Poor squirrel.
With your top lip raised and front teeth on show, no doubt an expression of pure agony, frozen in time at the exact point your brain shut down.
Look at you there, coiled up with your little paws in front of you, and your crooked spine and your bruised flank. Resting on a temporary tarmac grave, waiting for the fox or the street cleaner to take you away. Bless.
Is this the price we pay for the automobile? Wild animals brutalised and their dreams crushed on a daily basis at the radiator grille?
A small price to pay to be transported seamlessly and painlessly from point to point over great distances, the key to the joys of modern society presented to us every morning as a noisy procession of crumbling clutches with solitary drivers. Bumper to bumper they listen to the latest pop-music peddling cretin on the radio, doing his best to rid the world of wit.
I know the squirrel would never have listened to the breakfast radio in his life, but if you were him, wouldn’t you be happier now you were dead, on the infinitesimal chance that some freak accident allowed you to gain sentience overnight?
Lucky squirrel.