Perhaps the only thing thicker than the dust cloud was the pungent smell of smoldering tires mixed with all the other colored fluids that fill car radiators and the other receptacles that lie under the hood.

When I finally opened my eyes, I was suspended by my seatbelt, still in the driver's seat of my Jeep, which had come to rest on its passenger side. My hands still gripped the steering wheel as tightly now as when my pen first transformed itself from a writing implement into part of a Jeep. I realized that it was the seatbelt, rather than my knuckle-whitening grip on the wheel that had kept me from being violently ejected during the high-speed rollover, all along. This was a stroke of good fortune, because I am embarrassed to admit that, back then, I buckled my belt approximately 50% of the time. Needless to say, I now...
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