Now that their son had voted them out of existence, they looked back on their lives, specifically the years they spent raising him, and tried to piece together where they had gone wrong, and what they had done to her to engender such naked spite. After careful consideration, they decided it was their joint decision to force their son to play football even though he had zero aptitude for the sport. The humiliation that attended being bad at something he hated had most likely planted a seed in his soul that had taken years to sprout into an enormous flower of contempt. Now that an ambient sense of doom had enveloped them all, they took in stride what lay ahead, which was an express trip to the other side of the universe, where the infinitesimal alphabet of their existence would wait for a trillion years before being written again. They hoped that the next time around they would heed their son's protests, and let him play videogames instead.
"an enormous flower of contempt."
That says an awful lot to me.
Happy Thanksgiving, Chris.*