“Must’ve killed evey sonnofabitch in there,” he starts to joke to himself, but the smile never comes to his face. He checks the hitchhiker: there’s the smile that could tell of a thousand pleasures, but his eyes remain submerged in their icy blue depths, safely removing themselves from any joy in his face.

That peculiar phrase of the fat man’s steals into the driver’s head. “House a mirth, indeed,” he recites to himself. The driver isn’t sure what the word “mirth” means, but it sounds appropriate. It makes him think at once of both the hitchhiker and that dubious house of ill repute, and how the one seems to have been put on this Earth for the other.

“Mirth.” The driver rolls the word over his tongue and through his mind –he’s heard it before without ever questioning its meaning- before deciding that it must denote something like ‘wantonness’, though he wouldn’t know what that means either. The sentiment holds, all-the-same.