The parody “The Toad” is based on: The Roadby Cormac McCarthy
Novel synopsis:
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006, back cover.
NOTE: This writer considers The Road : a novel not to be walked by at the bookstore. Worth the stop.
The Toad
The black bough busted bashing ash into a black barrel of trash. The man woke and choked, coughing up ash. He spied where the cart was stashed in a pile of darkened ash. The boy rolled over in ash and wiped ash from his ashen face. Ash.
The man said do you know where we are. On the road. Do you know where we will be tomorrow? The road. One word to describe your life? Road trip. One word. Road.
The man knew that the boy knew that they both knew, knew the road. Ash whirled around them. Both coughed. A dead tree fell into the ash. The man day dreamed of a simpler time when he was a child and his family’s Christmas tree caught fire from a faulty wire and burned the house down to ashes. There would be no more holidays. Just ash. The boy would never know that kind of joy, never know. They were starving, wicked cruelly hungry like people that hadn’t eaten for days because they hadn’t. Ash landed in their open mouths. Just ash. Near the road, they approached a dried out pond that had no water. Just ash. Fish bone ash. They walked back through the black ash to the road.
On the edge of the road, dried out guts explode from a flattened toad.
The man said what do you think? What? What do you think? The boy said I ain’t eating toad on the road. Not toad on the road? Not toad on the road. Let’s go’ed.
Ash blew into their eyes as they left the toad and staggered off down the road.