BLOW OUT THE CARBON

Hypothesis: Redlining your engine occasionally helps eject carbon build-up. Fact: The idea is based on an engine design that hasn’t been used in a century. After explaining this, Thomas Douglas from the Guild of Automotive Restorers says to just let your car get up to operating temperature (usually between 90 and 104 degrees, which you can hit after just a few minutes of driving) before turning it off. Otherwise, soot that never gets burnt off can build up.

A LINE OF BLOOD RUNS FROM UNDER HER RIGHT NOSTRIL and then Rhea topples over at the market, clutching a bunch of tulips. She never rises. My wife is gone. Just like that. ¶ I travel for work so I shouldn’t be home for this, but I am. As soon as I jump off the running board at the depot, I feel every eye askance. Olympia is a small village, everyone knows everyone, word travels fast. ¶ I am taken to see her at the doctor’s house. He can’t answer my questions, doesn’t have the equipment to see. It’s not like the old days when there were hospitals and expertise. Now we must look out for one another. We grow gardens. We share a watermill. We run on solar. The village has roadlights but we don’t run them much because there are no wolves or outlaws and lights only draw swarms of insects. ¶ I leave the doctor in a dense daze. The villagers adored Rhea and they come condoling as I pass by the longhouses, the commons in the square on my way to the school. ¶ The name Olympia is immodest. The village sits on the Arctic shore of what used to be Alaska, near what was once Prudhoe Bay, but the geography is changed from the last paper maps when this was the centre of the world. When it was unbearable everywhere else. Now the Arctic is a warm body, full of jellyfish and black chokeweed. Our days are long and hot and then warm and short. But it rains and the soil is rich. The village holds some six hundred souls. Less one now. In the prefecture there are dozens of villages like this. We trade, but keep our distance. We survive on dispersion now. All bad news is local. A sinkhole, a flu, a fire, a bad crop. A woman falling over in a market.