Littering was Joe’s biggest pet peeve. He could be having the best day of his life, but the sight of someone lazily dropping trash would put him in a bad mood for hours.

So already stuck in inching traffic, staring at the debris on the side of the road, Joe was on a hair trigger.

The blue car ahead of him, who didn’t give him so much as a wave for letting them merge in front ten minutes ago, rolled down their window. He saw the driver fiddle with something in the centre console. He saw them drop the disposable coffee cup out of the window.

Traffic moved slightly. Enough that Joe could open his door to retrieve the cup. What contents hadn’t been spilled were cold, no longer drinkable and thus discarded.

Joe put it in the cup holder. He’d recycle it later.

Five minutes later, he saw the driver of the blue car drop the remains of a cigarette from the window and found himself unbuckling his seatbelt. A few moments later he approached the blue car on foot. The driver’s window was still open, the driver exhaling after drags of a second cigarette.

The cigarette butt was thrown in first, the movement enough for the distracted driver to turn and notice Joe, holding the coffee cup with his fingertips.

There was a blur. Then searing pain. Then screaming.

Joe returned to his car. Those disposable coffee cups really are the worst, he thought. The lids pop right off, and they barely hold in any heat. Plus they get floppy after a while, so it burns when you try to refill then. He gingerly screwed the lid tightly back onto his half-full thermos. The coffee inside was still too hot to drink, and he’d hate to get himself burned.