On the drive home from my boyfriend Evan’s funeral, his car tried to kill me. I suppose I should have been suspicious when he left it to me. He had never given me a gift without strings attached. And I guess I shouldn’t have taken it personally. After all, plenty of other people died that day.

But I was the one trapped inside.

First, I watched helplessly as it mowed through the crowd of mourners as they crossed the street. Elderly grandmothers and grandsons alike bumped beneath the wheels as the car accelerated from zero to eighty in a matter of seconds.

“Stop!” I shouted at the car. “Manual override!”

But the car’s AI didn’t obey.

The dashboard flashed with the words, “Requiem Mode” as the car sped out the cemetery and onto the city streets, weaving through traffic and ignoring traffic signs. I tried to jiggle the door handle and manually pull the locks, but it was no use. The car wasn’t letting me out.

“Why are you doing this?” I screamed.

That’s when I heard Evan’s voice playing over the car audio.

“Hey, Naomi. If you’re hearing this, I guess I didn’t survive the surgery. Huge bummer for both of us. You may not have known this, but if I’d made it, I was planning to propose. There’s this beautiful bluff overlooking the pacific over in Half Moon Bay. Man, you would have definitely said yes.”

“Fuck you!” I shouted. “I was going to break up with you. I just couldn’t find a way to do it after you got a goddamned brain tumor. I was trying to be nice!”

But of course, Evan didn’t respond back. The whole thing was just a recording. The AI driving the car could respond to a few basic commands, but it wasn’t exactly equipped to have a conversation.

“There’s a diamond ring in the glove compartment if you’d don’t believe me,” said Evan. “We would have been so happy together. I had so many plans for us. So many! I’m sure by next year, I would have made director at CarBrain! And then you could have quit that stupid job at the library and gotten to work on our family! I know, I know. I’m sure wedding planning would have taken up a lot of your time, but I was totally willing to knock you up first!”

I kicked at the window, but it was no good. The glass were made of some kind of nearly unscratchable material, the same kind they used on iPhones. There’d been so many nights in bed where Evan had droned on and on about the project. Maybe I should have paid better attention.

But he just made it so hard. Sometimes I’d play a game with myself where I’d set a timer to see how long it took him to ask a single question about my day. Sometimes the answer was all night.

“I was never going to marry you!” I screamed helplessly as the car swerved around a blind corner, hitting a boy riding a skateboard. The impact was so rapid that the boy practically exploded. The windshield wipers came on automatically to wash away the red spray.

I was breathing so hard I thought I might pass out by that point. I tried to think back to some mindfulness exercises I’d learned in my Yoga class, but I came up blank. Of course, that stuff had never worked for me.

The only place I felt calm was in the library. If Evan had ever bothered to ask, I would have told him about that. How when I was twelve and my dad would come home drunk from his shift, I’d bike over there and bury myself in books until closing, how even when the rest of my world was falling apart, I knew I was safe there.

The car merged onto the coastal highway, clipping a bicyclist as we accelerated. I couldn’t bring myself to look back at what we’d left of him.

“Please,” I told the car, trying to calm down. “Please just stop. Please just let me out.”

And all the while, Evan still wouldn’t shut up. Even in death. As his monologue continued, I looked all around the car for some kind of tool that would let me out. I tried clutching a key in my fist and stabbing at the glass, but I didn’t even nick it.

“...which I guess brings us to now,” he said. “I guess I figured in case I kicked the bucket, I needed to make sure I brought you with me. I know you’ve never believed in all this god stuff, but I know there’s some kind of afterlife. And I’m just no good without you. So… I figured I’d kind of bring you with me after the funeral. Sorry if that's a little faster than you wanted, but compared to eternity, what are a few years of life, right?”

I couldn’t panic. I had to think.

And so I went to the library.

I closed all of my senses as best I could, covering my eyes with my arm and trying to ignore the sound of Evan’s voice.

I was twelve again, and walking through the library stacks, carefully reading the dewey decimal numbers. I was looking for a book whose number I’d written with a tiny pencil on a notecard. What had it been about?

I passed history, biography and finally ended up in the geology section. There, I flipped through books on volcanoes and the history of the planet, none quite the right match for my card. And then finally, I found the one I was looking for: precious stones.

I flipped through the dusty pages, the musty smell of age filling my nostrils. And finally I saw it, the page on diamonds, a perfect 10 on Moh’s scale of hardness. Perfectly capable of breaking glass.

As I snapped back to reality, I realized the car was slowing down slightly, veering off the road onto a grassy field that seemed to crest up into the sky. And as I looked toward our destination, my stomach sank. These were the cliffs Evan must have been talking about, a two-hundred foot drop straight into the Pacific.

I reached for the glove compartment, scrambling to open it. A teal box tumbled out onto the floor, opening as it landed. For a second, I thought the ring had fallen beneath the seat, never to be seen again. Then I caught the glint of it on the floor mat. Thank god Evan had been such a status whore: the diamond was huge.

The car was screaming up the hill toward certain doom, picking up speed. I didn’t have a moment to spare. I slipped the ring on my finger, pulled back my arm, and punched forward with everything I had. The glass shattered into a thousand pieces.

Then, without another thought, I hoisted myself out of the car, rolling as I hit the soft grass. Two more seconds, and the car was gone, carrying Evan’s final words with it as it disappeared into the ocean.

And as I lay there, I just started laughing, thinking of his voice still droning on underwater, lecturing the fish and mermaids with his last, stupid thoughts.

All around, it was quiet as a library, and Evan was silent for good.