A sympathy for the whales

This is an incomplete story. If there is enough interest, I will finish it.
The punchline of the completed piece will be: "Damn you, Greenpeace!"
Please vote Yes or No via email (grdn19@gmail.com) or via Twitter (#damnyougreenpeace)



A BATTERED green pick-up bumps along a deserted Ohio back road. Plumes of orange dust rise like monstrous rooster plumes each time it strays off the blacktop and fish-tails back on again. It has a gate-scratch down one side, smashed tail-lights and a buckled fender where it hit a 300lb hog on a rainy night in a cow paddock. Took some fancy driving that did, to hit that pig.

At the wheel of the pick-up is Dwayne. Dwayne is one of 14 children, and even though he's three months off his 19th birthday he has seven kids of his own. Some of them to the same mother.

He hunches over the steering wheel, chubby hands clutching it hard as he thinks of Emmy-Lou-May back home. Emmy-Lou-May is the mother of his two youngest and the woman he truly loves. At the moment. Dwayne is thinking about the grits and greens Emmy-Lou-May has waiting for him. His ample stomach, barely contained by his denim britches, rumbles under the V8 grunt of the pick-up.

It's sunset, and as Dwayne drives west the blazing ball is low in his eyes and he squints hard to see the road. That's why -- on account of the low sun in his eyes -- Dwayne doesn't see the spaceship hovering at tree-height 200 yards ahead. And that's why -- on account of his rumbling ample stomach and the grunting V8 -- he doesn't hear it as it hums menacingly upon his approach.