Inflation by REYoung

Author:REYoung [REYoung]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TageTage Press
Published: 2019-08-26T07:00:00+00:00

He found May in the kitchen. He had imagined her offering him sympathy, love, maybe a compassionate hug to compensate for his ordeal. He’d even had this crazy idea she might make him a cup of hot chocolate and tuck a blanket around him the way his mother did when he was a child. Her anger shocked him.

“Marty, where have you been? And look at yourself. You’re a mess.”

He looked at himself. His clothes were wet, disheveled, his shoes muddy. He smelled of beer, cigar smoke. He tried to explain. The car had broken down. No, he didn’t know where exactly, somewhere out in the country.

This seemed to upset May even more. It was almost as if he had told her he was having an affair. The country? What was he doing out in the country? “Honestly, Martin, I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.” He regretted not picking up some of those damn banana custard cream puffs.

The following morning went just as badly. First, a dismal breakfast—his appetite spoiled when the chefbot, still not quite up to snuff, gave him a dish of runny eggs and a diarrheic splat of uncooked pancake batter. Then May came into the kitchen and immediately started to berate him again. When he called later about the car he was rerouted several times by voicebots before a technician finally came on. He started to explain his predicament but the technician curtly interrupted him.

“Where is your car, sir?”

“I don’t know exactly … out in the country somewhere.” He heard silence on the other end, and then an incredulous voice.

“The country? What the heck were you doing out in the country? Were there any cows? You know—moooooo?”

Great. After May’s lecture last night and again this morning, now he had to hear it from this idiot. Worse, instead of challenging this moron’s impudence, he found himself apologizing, “I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to … I don’t know how it happened.”

“Hey, no problemo,” the technician said in a breezy, condescending tone that immediately made him regret his own obsequiousness. “Hold on a sec, I’ll bring it up on the screen. Yep, here it is, your car already called it in.”

The car called it in? How was that possible?

“Ha!Ha!Ha!” the tech laughed as if he had read his thoughts over the phone. “Your car may be dead, sir, but there’s always a glimmer of life in its brain.”

Its brain?

And then, after putting up with this jerk’s rudeness, when he got the car back, of course it had something to say.

I know this is difficult for both of us, Marty, but really, I think it was rather irresponsible of you to take that little excursion without consulting me first.

“Irresponsible of me?” he said, outraged at the car’s accusatory tone. Wasn’t it the car’s responsibility to keep track of its maintenance records and inform him of any problems? When he tried to raise these objections, the car abruptly asked if he required anything else, and with a distinctive sniff through its air vents, slipped into silence.

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