A Machine's Exodus by Evelyn deVos (18, Arizona)

There is a black spot under my driver’s seat window 
It is non-unique, joined by other assorted stains both greater in size and darker and color than it
Because the car has been allowed to fall into disarray. 
There was a time when I welcomed that. I saw each dent scrape and scar adorning the metal body as a sign of a life-well lived, a journey well-travelled, for the poor old car who will someday sit in a scrapyard, unloved 
The scavengers who loot it for parts will know it was once loved by me, or by someone, anyways. I suppose the who doesn’t matter. ​

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One day I was backing out of my too narrow driveway and scraped the car’s side on an ill-placed branch. A jagged scar tore through its midsection, and for the first time, I did not revel in its injury. Somehow, something changed. I had never hurt anything before, I had hardly lived up 
until now. Then suddenly there is a warm thing that beats for me, and I am entrusted with it; I didn’t even ask for that. 
I wept at its rubber feet. 
Unloved, unloved, unloved, I must be 
Cried the poor thing and I had nothing to say to console it. 
I hurt it and I felt bad. 
I told no one. The car was bought like that, or something. Someone must have scratched it up. I suppose the who doesn’t matter. 
Another day I was leaving a crowded coffee shop right before nightfall and knocked into a pole. It sounds more eventful than it was. The pole leaned a bit to the left and the car was unscathed. Still, it cried out unloved, unloved, unloved! In a shrill tone of mechanical beeps and whirs that only I could hear. 
I wanted to fall down to my knees and weep again, but a public display of grief would be unbecoming of me. Who was I to give a eulogy there? Such a sacred act, it must be done behind
closed doors. And besides, my friends who admonished my carelessness couldn’t hear the inconsolable car whinging away. So I laughed off the event only to replay it in my mind again and again and again as I crept home, cautious as could be. Possessed by a reverent silence, I vowed to never wound it again. I chose to repent in the garage as soon as I found solace. I baptized myself in gasoline and cried unloved, unloved, unloved! 
And so did it. Our bellows melded into a sick cacophony of strangled screams and rattling gears. Our words got lost but the meanings remained. Anyone would recognize our almost primitive howls as the calls of the unwanted, the deserving sick. Diesel dripped down my throat and set my mouth on fire. I could only scream after that, as unintelligible as the aching vehicle before 
me. In that moment it was more flesh and blood than I could ever be. I don’t know if I envied or pitied that. 
It wouldn’t have made a difference. 
We were sent to the scrapyard, the deserving sick, smelling of smoke and soon to be hollow. Pillagers fumbled over my body in the darkness, hoping to find an unattended wallet, or possibly an organ or two. 
The search was fruitless. Nothing to find but the bruise on my elbow made in the throes of laughter, the old lovebite nestled on my collarbone, and the scar on my ankle - once a deep gash patched up by my mother. 
At least they knew that I was loved by someone once. That I was someone once. But I suppose the who never mattered.

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