The Second Invention

He was a man with a dream to build the world's first flying car.

He had realized this dream late one night, about ten years back. Angered by the events in his life those days and with a new project to look forward to, he left his family for place off the map with his old Volkswagen and some boxes of buildings supplies.

"I'm just feeling it today," he said. He had made some repairs the morning before, so he was confident that this trial- just as he had been confident about all the trials before it- would be the one.

He got into his car. He let it run at full speed a bit before pulling on the throttle and thereby seeing if yesterday's work and the work of the last decade was worth it.

But yes! As he pulled the throttle the car rose! He looked down, shocked, at the desert floor spreading out beneath him.

He eased up on the throttle; soon after the car came crashing down violently, setting off the airbag which hit him painfully in the chest.

But no matter! He had done it! Fame would come first, fortune soon after. He ran back to his shed, leaping and cheering.

Now one of the details about where the man lived was that there were some scattered houses around him. Each resident knew of the crazy guy that lived nearby, and each stayed his distance away. But one of them had made the habit of running to the nearest store, some twenty miles away, and buying a newspaper for each of the houses in the vicinity. Perhaps it was to return the favor of the grocery shopping one househoold did for the rest and the way the old lady with the cats let everyone crowd around her TV.

In this way, the man with the car stayed informed on what exactly was destroying the earth, although he needed no news to know that it was being slowly destroyed.

So as he flung open the door of his shack, still in euphoria, the first thing that caught his eye was the paper lying on the ground. In big, bold letters, the headline read, "Kansas inventor builds world's first flying car."

In a fury he read the pages of the story. But the design! How much better was the one in the paper than his own! He was in shock over how measly his vehicle was compared to this other man's specimen.

So he looked in his tool box and grabbed the first metal bar he saw and went outside with the intention of making his creation that much more worthless.