Fifty strangers were lined up to spray paint my car.

The sound suggested I’d run over a wheelchair. When it had first begun, the shriek had been too sudden to appreciate any nuance, but now that I’d been living with it for a few miles, I could pick out that specific timbre — a poignant combination of metallic shirring, rubber flapping, and vehicular criminality.

On a certain level, I realized that death was a very real possibility.

It was a good day for an apocalypse.

She was knitting when the brakes went out.

“The tint is illegal,” he told me, “but I’ve never gotten pulled over for it.” I was standing in a freezing-cold garage looking at a blacked out 2011 Nissan 370Z. It crouched so low to the ground that preschoolers could play leapfrog over it. Its marriage prospects had been improved by the addition of a top mount…