Surrender, Dorothy!

Dorothy carried a dozen miniature white flags on the front seat of her car. Her reasoning was that if she did something to provoke other drivers, she could wave a little white flag of surrender. She hoped that would mollify the hotheads, and they would refrain from hurting her or her passengers—although, really, the only passenger she ever ferried was her rescue dog, Buster.

In the news, it was always the innocent passenger who got shot, not the driver who escalated the violence by shooting the bird.

Idling at a red light, she checked the rearview mirror. The late afternoon sun prevented her from seeing who was operating the car behind her. It was tucked up a bit too close. Tailgating was a symptom, wasn't it? A sign that road rage was brewing?

The glare on her dirty windshield made it hard to distinguish the red from the green light. Wiper fluid made things worse.

She hadn’t yet read a story where it was the family dog that got shot, but it was just a matter of time till some such tale broke animal lovers’ hearts. What if her own beloved Buster was in the backseat when the bullets started flying? She would enlist social media, plead for tips that would lead to the killer's arrest, start a GoFundMe for the therapy she would need.

Ah, but then the hate mail would start. The trolls would find her, make death threats, say it was a false flag operation, insist that she didn’t even own a dog.

It amazed her that no matter the topic, there was always a hothead ready to make death threats. She knew from experience that you could blog about something as harmless as your preferred technique for icing a cupcake—with a spoon instead of a knife—and get comments about the various forms of fatal torture you should endure. She wondered if the nastiness was as widespread as it seemed, or was it really just a handful of hooligans out there on the worldwide web, some of them putting out 30, 40, maybe 50 threats a day (not to mention a smorgasbord of hurtful comments).

At that pace, by afternoon they’d lose track of what had so enraged them in the morning, slouched at their monitor in Flintstones boxer shorts and the type of undershirt called a wife beater, slurping tepid instant coffee diluted with non-dairy creamer—because she couldn't imagine a troll savoring a dark roast latte while spewing his vitriol.

She envisioned a prototypical professional hater, blubber spilling over his shorts, fish-belly white under downy poufs of body hair, an innie navel miles deep with a treasure trove of poly-blend lurking at the bottom of the well, the juncture where he had connected to his mother in utero. Does he feel that connection to Mom as he presses 'send' on yet another anonymous death threat, even as the index finger of his free hand excavates for lint at the very nexus of his humanity?

She wondered, might it even be the same guy, the hate mail troll and the road rage assassin? Is the lint picker finally moved to crank it up a notch, to go from armchair malcontent to armed arbiter of the freeways, cruising around, seeking to let off some vigilante steam by 86ing a stranger that he has self-righteously judged to be an irredeemable moron?

The driver behind her doesn’t just honk, he lays on the horn. That’s rage. She wonders how long the light has been green. Probably, to engender that much rage, a good three to five seconds. She starts across the intersection, steers with her right hand while grabbing a miniature white flag with her left, lets her window down with the push of a button, and gets the flag right out there where he can see it.

But the wind immediately whips the cheap fabric off its mooring and sends the flag tumbling onto the street, so that all she’s clutching is a stubby stick that looks like a finger.

An extended middle finger.