The creature’s little orange light blinks its beady eye at you.
It bleats at you any time you make a move it doesn’t like, just waiting to tie you down.
A loud pop snaps through the silence as it loses one of its round legs.
Could any object have worse timing for its misbehavior than a car?
Whether warning of low fuel, a damaged tire, or demanding you reclose a door, cars are a handful.
And in the past month, mine has decided to pull out the stops in a massive display of minor wrongdoings.
You see, it’s not that Ghost—as I affectionately call her—has given me any major trouble lately.
It’s that everything small that could go wrong, has: a nail in a tire, rodentchewed wiring, new spark plugs needed…
She has simply decided that draining my bank account is an amusing pastime.
The problems don’t stop with Ghost, either. They began with Nessie.
My boyfriend’s car, Nessie, decided today that springing a leak in her engine coolant system was a wonderful way to congratulate him on his recent move, leaving him no choice but to pull over or risk Nessie’s engine combusting in a not-so-good way.
This after Nessie had stopped working entirely, abruptly, in the middle of the road, multiple times in the last six months, and—here comes the best part—thus far, mechanics have been utterly unable to find the source of this disturbing behavioral issue.
I think Nessie caught this behavior from Spitfire, my former vehicle, and then passed it on to Ghost, since they spent so much time hanging out together in my boyfriend’s driveway before we moved in together and into our new apartment.
Spitfire was old and understandably crotchety thanks to the hundreds of thousands of difficultterrain miles she had been put through when she replaced Bob-Bob as the family vehicle, before she was ever passed on to me in the first place.
Bob-Bob was an expert in causing problems, so much so that the antiquated hunter-green van’s name was an acronym for Bucket Of Bolts that is Breaking Our Budget.
So yes, Nessie and Ghost have studied from a long line of experts in disorderly conduct.
Either that or Ghost is upset at the way apartment living has forced her and Nessie to spend less time together, and so she’s acting up as a way to get back at her humans for this betrayal.
I know I’m blessed to have Ghost—the distance from Edmond to Chandler for work each day would make for a very long walk and I’m lucky to have transportation accessible to me.
I simply wish that said transportation would stop with the theatrics.
After all, I’m the one with the theatre degree, not my car.