Really, Actually, Empty
The car shuddered just a bit about halfway through first gear, hesitated a single beat of combustion, which I noticed nervously but shrugged off. After the second or third time it had done this in as many blocks, a mounting dull terror began to work its way through my already very-weary-of-car-problems soul. This car was a recent purchase. Nothing was supposed to go wrong. It was checked out by a trusted mechanic, and I was given to understand that it had a Toyata engine which would outlast the syndication run of most succesful sitcoms. And besides all that, hadn't I accrued an unquestionably positive balance of car karma by nursing my ailing Sentra through three years of automotive aneurisms? But here was my Prizm, lurching, coughing, and...
Fortunately, the problem was the driver: an apparently absentminded fool who was not paying attention to the gas gauge. A driver who had, last time he looked at it, assumed that just like the 85 Nissan Sentra he owned before, one had perhaps an entire moon phase after the needle reached "E" before one actually had to refill the tank. As the Prizm began to get down to the serious business of sputtering, dying, and refusing to start again, I realized I'd been thinking about getting around to refilling it for the last three days or so, but each time, I had decided my destination was more urgent than the fuel. The engine went silent and slack. I turned the vehicle downhill, coasted through an apartment complex, and onto a road which headed towards a gas station. Unfortunately, the road sloped ever so slightly uphill.