Slightly edited to make tense, etc., consistent.
Just before dawn, he, not troubled or indecisive, set out for the office in an old Honda carrying the loaded rifle. It would would have been a stretch to call the car beautiful the day it rolled off the assembly line, when its utilitarian lines were still new and the gleaming paint politely but firmly proclaimed its reliability and efficiency; the subsequent years of hard service under a careless hand had left it in such a deplorable state of appearance that it was only possible to believe that the vehicle’s operator was attached to the machine beyond reason- it was only a mystery as to whether the bonds were forged from love or hatred. A closer inspection of the inside of the hapless heap evoked memories of family road trips; stitches fray from the two-spoke steering wheel, escaping their leather bonds only to be further unraveled by massive hands white-knuckling 10 and 2 o’clock – hand over hand over hand, he can smell Kentucky in August, he can see the worn steel rim set free. Off in the distance, he can make out a column of smoke wriggling skyward, rising out of the approaching hills like a cobra rearing its sinister head from the charmer’s basket, dark and foreboding. Whatever failure, joy, misery, or triumph that menacing pillar might portend is inconsequential, for the time to weigh options has passed. His memories felt foreign but the only thought, a gut feeling was “Damn the Pillar. Only forward”, and so he did.
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