“An Ode to My 2002 VX Commodore” 2024 Fictional Flashbacks! Shortlist

We barrel across the Narrows in the stagnant heat of a summer’s midnight, low and intimate with the bitumen. Windows down, radio blaring. Tepid streetlights strobe in the spaceship curves of your bonnet. The freeway is ours, you promise, and the tiny city with its sprawling suburbia stretches vast and beckoning through your windscreen.
And now, old warhorse, with your wheezing, stuttering engine, time has rusted you, rendered you impotent and slow. Trapped us together in morning gridlock, where we crawl and rattle towards mundane pastures. But I don’t mind, because you kept your promise when we were young.