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By Root 652 0

the spot, put the car in gear, and mashed the accelerator. He cackled as he struggled to control the car – or at least, to keep it pointed generally in the direction he hoped to go – as he tore up the ramps that led to the exit with the sort of artistic flair and panache that would have humbled and shamed Olympic ice dancers. He worked his way up the ramps at speeds well in excess of the posted five-miles-per-hour limit, never managing to align the front of the car and his intended direction for more than a second or two at a time. The tires squealed and smoked and the car lurched and slid as rubber and concrete came to terms about how best to apply 500 horsepower and 400 lb-ft of torque in the face of the wholly-inadequate friction coefficient of slimy, underground concrete. The fun, however, came to an abrupt halt as he approached the garage exit.

There in the middle of the exit lane, like a speed bump turned on end, stood a short man in a green, FunParc shirt – Satan’s parking garage nemesis. This wasn’t his first run in with the parking guy. He remembered thinking that Jesus was a gigantic pain in the ass, but this guy? He was on his way to earning his very own circle of Hell.

Satan eased the raging bull forward, goosing the throttle to make the engine emit a demonic snort, and rolled down the window. He stared straight ahead, ignoring the man until the window finished gliding all the way down into the door. Then, slowly, he turned a disdainful eye on the FunParc man.

The garage attendant did not react to the Devil’s television-worthy greeting. Instead, he waddled up, and with a sigh, squatted awkwardly beside the car. He squinted as he peered in at Satan.

“You must have parking pass,” he said in a foreign accent that revealed little about his origins other than that he should probably try to get back to them. “You don’t park here without pass.”

The Prince of Darkness tried to remain calm as he pointed to where he’d duct-taped his parking pass to his windshield earlier – the result of his last run in with this extraordinarily dense asshat. “It’s right there, on the windshield, exactly where you told me to put it.”

“No, very sorry sir. You must hang pass from mirror. It must hang from mirror.” He made a twisting gesture with his hand, as if the problem had maybe just been that the Dark Lord of the Underworld hadn’t been able to figure out how to attach his parking pass to his mirror.

“You moronic twit, you are the one who told me that you couldn’t see it when I hung it from the mirror.” He paused to take a deep breath. “Tell me, please, are we going to have to do this every time I come through?”

“The parking pass must hang from mirror to show you have contract to park here. If we can’t see pass, we think you don’t have contract. We have you towed.”

Satan decided to try another tack. “Listen, how many other $250,000 Italian sports cars do you see here?”

“I’m sorry, sir?” The attendant made a face as if he’d just been told his mother and his favorite goat were having an affair.

“Look around, you knob. Do you now see – or have you ever seen – any other cars that look anything like this one? At some point, shouldn’t you start to think, ‘Ah yes, here comes that odd-looking white car!’” The Dark Lord omitted to point out the red “go faster” stripe he’d had painted down the center of the car, making it unique, even among Italian exotics.

This argument appeared to confuse the attendant, who simply returned to what he knew. “Eh ... your parking pass ... it must be in visible spot.” The pronouncement thus pronounced, the attendant stood back on his heels, folded his arms, and raised his eyebrows with finality. “Or we tow car.”

“It’s taped to the fucking windshield! How is that not a ... ?” Satan stopped, deflated. There was no point trying to convince this moron. “You don’t have any idea what I’m saying, do you?” he said. “Okay, then.” He put his car in gear and drove off.

The parking attendant spent the next two and a half hours on fire.

The fire department showed up and tried to put him out, but the firefighters