I was sitting in my car at the time I invented it. The most wondrous invention in the history of history itself. I could hardly believe it. I just sat there in my clapped out wreck of a car staring at the traffic lights, watching them change and not reacting. I could see it as clearly as the rain on the windscreen. It was perfect in its – erm – perfection and would easily solve all of the problems I had posed. It was so simple and then…
PARP
The arsehole in the car behind me honked his horn and it slipped away from me. The idea I mean, not the car. I tried so hard to hold onto it but it just wouldn’t stay still. As my car picked up speed so did the invention, rolling its way out of my mind’s grasp. I felt sick. Society would never forgive me if it ever found out. The greatest invention. A supreme fabrication. Gone.
I glanced in the mirror and saw him. The man who had stolen the invention from humanity. Talking on his fucking mobile phone and riding my bumper.
It’s difficult to know whether it was a decision I made or whether I performed the feat on a subconscious level. I just waited until I reached seventy miles per hour and then stamped on the brakes. With a rending, tearing metallic howl his car violently mounted mine and dragged the pair of them into the hard shoulder and the bushes beyond.
As I dragged myself from the airbag filled wreckage I touched a wound on the side of my head and felt the warm blood on my fingers, the pain shooting reassuringly through me. I was alive. No thanks to my bloody idiot of a subconscious.
Dragging my left leg behind me I moved to see if I could see him and he was there, screeching and honking. I turned my back on the cars and listened again. It sounded like geese. Then, in an instant it came back to me and I realised, too late, that the greatest invention was useless. Pointless. I’ve wreaked mankind’s retribution on this man and it was all just a mistake.
A rubbish invention. And as if that wasn’t bad enough an idiotic idea to boot.
I breathed heavily, coughing as I slowly moved myself further and further from his howls then sat down on the crash barriers at the roadside and waited.
