Roads of No Return
Danessa Yip
Grade 12
Title: Roads of No Return
Description: During an argument over having to give a ride to his daughter, a father starts to lose all sense of humanity while asserting that his point of view is correct. This is a piece that I wrote for American Literature in my junior year while trying to emulate the Gothic Romanticism literary genre.
Roads of No Return
It is no secret that human insecurity will always lead to self-sabotage. The more we fear that something is true the more this paranoia will engulf our beings and become the truth in our minds. Human beings are led by their need to satisfy their own egos, and they become lost as they continue to seek ways to feed their egos. Humans always give in to their desires and their inability to resist their temptations will destroy their essence.
On the evening of a full moon, my father made a secret pact with my mother to bring me to the library. I wanted to finish my literary analysis paper and I needed to borrow resources from the library. My father apparently agreed to the task wholeheartedly, since he was sympathetic to the leg pain that my mother was enduring. As I left the safety of my home and was ready to embark on the trip, I noticed that my father’s face had become red. I paid no mind to his appearance and went ahead to the dark car. He drove the car towards the twisting roads of the hills we lived on. As I gazed at the road, my father began to toy with the GPS system. He became frustrated after awhile, and confessed that he didn’t know the way to the library fearfully. I briefly mused about this revelation but quickly turned my thoughts elsewhere.
Through the hills, my father drove more recklessly through the woods and the twisting roads leading us to the bowels of the dark city. The moon began to rise and the day gradually faded away. My father struggled to see through the fog and could not see the path towards the library. He pressed the buttons on his GPS apprehensively, hoping to find the right combination of buttons and find his way through the darkness. He gave up in frustration, unable to set the GPS the way he preferred. He could not comprehend the controls on the GPS, believing that they had been changed from the last time he used the car.
As the fog in his surroundings became thicker, my father’s mood began to worsen. “I hate this setting on the GPS! Your mother changed the settings on the car unknowingly and I can’t find the way to the library now!” my father cried. “I told her not to change the settings on the GPS! I hate the fact that I have to bring you to the library,” he screamed, his voice becoming larger in resonance.
“Mom uses this car regularly to commute from home to work. Since she drives this car most of the time, she should be able to change the settings so she could find her way to her workplace,” I argued. I became absorbed in thought while listening to his fulmination. I came to the conclusion that I should try reasoning with him and change his mind about the situation. However, this only furthered my father’s anger, and the air seemed to become colder.
“Don’t you dare tell me that! Mom made me bring you here. I had to use this car to get here and I don’t know where I’m going! I’m getting really angry now!” my dad bellowed.
Throughout the ride to the library, I had not looked at my father. I turned towards my father in an effort to understand his feelings. I could not believe what I saw as I glanced at my father. In the seat next to me, it seemed that a diabolical beast had taken the place of my father. He had red horns sprouting out of his hair and his open, fanged mouth produced drops of mucus filled saliva. Each breath he took was followed by a deep exhale that emitted a green gas of hatred and jealousy. The gas seemed to contaminate the air around the beast.
“I own this car because I paid for it! No one controls the settings except for me! I don’t care if your mom drives this car to work! Why did she force me to bring you to the library?” the beast said. His tirade released a nervous feeling that I had been suppressing. I could not face my father. He had become something so unrecognizable that all I wanted to do the rest of the ride was scream and flee from the beast’s reach. When my father– or the beast that was formerly my father— spoke, his very words incited more feelings of terror towards him. I realized that he had become so absorbed in his conviction that my mother was completely wrong and had caused all of his problems that he was no longer himself. I sat in disbelief.
When we reached the library, I quickly leaped out of the car and cowered under a street lamp fearing that the beast would come out and attack me. I found shelter inside the library and fell asleep. I began to have dreams about a man who had become a beast because of his inability to accept that he had caused all of the problems that he suffered from. He had signed a contract with the devil in which he would accept responsibility for all of his actions and never curse those he thought caused his struggles in life. While he was a beast, he submitted to his never-ending rage and ate the one whom he thought caused his pain. I realized that the person he ate was my mother and I woke up in a cold sweat. I felt such apprehension that I stayed at the library overnight, fearing that I would not be able to see any of my parents when I came home.