It was raining. The water fell and shattered against the windows of the cars driving down the highway, and eventually slipped down to the cracks into the road, and eventually be inevitably be picked back up into the sky hours later, forever repeating, in different places at different times.

Despite the strange beauty of such a cycle, people did not enjoy the sensation of rain coating their bodies. Instead, they despised the rain and refused to listen to the strange songs it sang, or look for the things hidden inside.

One of these things was a small, frail old woman, who shivered in the rain. Her name was Ms.Willow, and she was quite a simple old lady. She read old tales to her children, raised them to the best of her ability, and smiled often. She didn't know that it would be raining today. Unsure, but determined to get home and not bother her children with her troubles, she refrained from calling them and stuck her thumb out on the highway.

10 minutes later, A car had stopped on the side of the highway, and Ms.Willow was no longer shivering in the rain.

She had been hit by a car. Despite the pain she was in, she smiled, and embraced the man trying in vain, to help her up. She smiled and shook her head. The man holding her looked at her for a moment and shook with more emotion than he had ever felt before. As he laid her tenderly on the ground next to the highway, her smile faded, and a grimace slowly clawed its way into sight. As the man turned to leave, he felt her tug weakly on his shoulder.

Seeing her pain, the man snapped her neck. It was the greatest act of mercy he had ever committed. It was the only.

Looking at the woman's splayed, ugly death, he could not help but hold the image in his mind. Her body the centrepiece to a distorted watercolour, with the highway a blurry background of endless lines only interrupted by his grey sedan and the forest bordering the highway.

In the months to come, her children would settle their differences, and meet in mutual respect of their shared tragedy. They would give up their petty squabbles, to honour their only mentor - their only guide in life. The late Ms.Willow was never forgotten. She never truly died, in that respect.

Making his way back into the car, he touched his hands to his face reverently. He could not tell if his face was wet with rain or tears. He hoped it was both. It was neither.

After taking a moment to start his car, he drove away from her dead body and listened to Chopin as he drove across the highway. The death of the old woman had put the man in a state of melancholy.

A portly, bald gentleman was waiting for someone to pick him up for about half an hour, yet no one saw him. He had started wondering if he would ever get out of the rain, his lips almost blue with cold.

Unfortunately for him, a grey sedan stopped next to him. The portly gentlemen smiled and thanked the man profusely as he entered. As he started uttering directions and taking off his wet jacket, the car started moving.

The gentlemen listened to the music for a moment and complimented the driver on his choice of music. He gushed over how much he loved Chopin and the classical style. The gentlemen had never heard Chopin before, but had known of him, and knew he was of importance if one wanted to appear sophisticated. The driver turned his head slightly, looking at the gentlemen at his side. He had not uttered a word to the gentlemen.

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Chopin's hands composed a melody that ever so slowly made its way out to the car's speakers and slowly embraced the silence, only to be ruined by the gentlemen's attempts to stifle the silence and to appear impressive.

It did not matter to the gentlemen that he be impressive or sophisticated, only that he appeared so.

It did not matter to the driver at all. And yet the gentlemen talked. Earnestly, endlessly. Until he finally closed his mouth and let Chopin's music speak for itself. It said nothing, only gently played, as the gentlemen's life drained away from him, into the far too expensive suit he bought, instead of a jacket.

His wife would mourn his death, and so would his heirs, for the appropriate amount of time, before forgetting him entirely. He would die unremarkable, with only a number that he never used to his name.

He stopped once he reached a stretch of road and dumped the body. he did not remove the knife from the man's body, nor did he treat him with respect.

He did, however, burn the gloves he had held the man with. Unlike the old woman, however, he did not feel anything from his death, except a quiet contempt for his ugly, dying form. It always astounded him how shocking a corpse looked, the body bent in positions so horrible - so inhumane, that they took upon themselves to create a new form of expression. Yet this man's corpse expressed nothing that made it distinct. The man had died as he lived - an abomination of other's thoughts on top of others' thoughts coalesced into one unextraordinary man, who's only virtue was his lack of it. In that sense, the gentlemen was never alive.

The man drove off, feeling nothing.

Finally, as the rain started to fade away, and the sky slowly darkened, there were fewer yet on the sides of the highway, waiting to be picked up. One was a scraggly young lad, hat askew, resting under the shade of an oak tree, the leaves having shielded him from the rain. Next to him, sat a birdhouse, painstakingly constructed from the remains of a branch torn off the tree, the lad's bag hanging from another branch.

He smiled, watching the car pull to a stop next to his resting place. As the man let him into the car, the boy smiled. He wielded an innocent, carefree smile as he muttered platitudes of gratitude to the man. He did not answer.

As the car slowly started, the boy took his knife with the ease of practice and stabbed into the driver's throat. Only to find, that the knife had gone through the man's hand and that they were now going too fast for him to survive if he killed the driver now.

The lad smiled bitterly, and ugly expression of absolute rage, yet also sublime relaxation. The man opened his mouth to speak. The boy expected rage, fear, emotion. He had not expected the cold and calm demeanour of someone discussing the weather.

"Why?" He asked. Yet he did not ask it, but stated it.

"I don't know." The boy simply replied, a feeling of frustration working its way through his mind. His anger at being unable to articulate why he felt this feeling - of confusing toxic hatred and contempt for all others, that he hid behind a mask of respect and boyish helplessness.

"I hate them. All of them. Not for what they are, but for what they represent." The man said, detached and calm. And yet to the boy, he felt as if the man had screamed, loud enough to burst his eardrums. So concentrated was the anger in those words, he could not forget it. The man took his arm and reached over the boy, grabbing the glove box. Inside, was a set of bandages and other medical supplies. The boy pulled the knife out of the man's hand, and slowly wrapped a bandage around the wound. The man dropped the boy off outside his home, and neither of them killed out of hatred anymore.

They were no longer alone and could see the hope they had for their fellow man and woman slowly revive. There was hope, for each and every individual human being to become their own, and to separate from the vortex that was their shared humanity.

Years later, The man and the boy would meet each other again. They would smile and shake hands. That they did that at all was all that mattered.