My son, the truck

While obsessed with trucks (and all manner of vehicles), I do not believe my son, Seth, wants to be a truck driver.

Rather, he wants to be a truck.

Seth doesn't just talk about trucks or cars; he deeply embodies them. The boy trembles as a revving engine, shouts the blaring horn at 6am, contorts into the crumpling, crashing chassis, and exhales through an exhaust pipe when angry.

He looks at me oddly when I suggest trucks and cars are objects that need drivers to move. For Seth, they are their own cause, and more than merely vehicles to transport humans from point A to B. "What's the Hyundai thinking?", Seth ponders while pressing his fingertip on his bottom lip. "The Nissan is warm and takes care of me", Seth claims as he lies on our car bonnet in the afternoon sun.

Recently, he drew my attention to automobiles in the street, noting that this motorbike likes ice cream, that that bus is worried about spiders, that those diggers are feeling sleepy. It's getting hard to tell where Seth ends and these machines begin.

I think of this in bed at night and lie in horror. It is clear to me now that, very soon, I will awake to find Seth's hands transformed into fleshy, clawed buckets, his ankles become axles with feet curled and fused back into themselves, his eyes begun to glare like headlamps in the dark.

Either that, or we will need to move to Bathurst.