The Hillside Strangler Carbecue

My inner glow of glee began to wan as I approached the Hillside Strangler, the appellation of an odious triadic junction of highways located in the suburb, Hillside. The traffic merges into the other, concomitantly bottlenecking and thus "strangling" the flow of traffic, resulting in a tedious bumper to bumper crawl, regardless of the time of day. Today, as we sunk deeper into the tangled mess, there rose ashes and black smoke into the sky. It appeared there was a 5-car pile up roasting on the highway, upon which, every passing vehicle felt the need to slow down and voyeuristically gape at the carnage. Such spectacles are such a common occurance in my absurd profession that I've developed a rather cavalier attitude of such matters, however, this time I could actually see a couple of people standing outside the burning wreckage of their cars, in a daze, covered in blood. Apparently, the accident had only just occured minutes earlier. I suddenly became acutely aware of the somnolent chirring of the 17-year cicadas and of the approaching sirens, the auditory duality of which put me under a hypnotic spell. The traffic then began to break apart and disperse. As I accelerated to 80mph, the light in the sky faded to a soft pink and the evening sun floated low upon the horizon. The ethereal rosy effulgence blanketed the sprawling landscape of endless highways and dismal powerline towers, rendering the formerly ghastly scene an opiated amethyst hallucination.