Cracking Up

Published in Spillwords Press, May 13 2026

At first glance, Nicholas’ new car was perfect. He liked the sheen, the smell, the idea of a clean slate—a fresh start. More than anything, he loved the front windshield. It sparkled, and offered a seemingly limitless view of the outside world. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he felt satisfied, powerful, and in control.

When he picked up his new, red, 4-wheel drive compact car at the dealership, he carefully inspected it from top to bottom and from tip to tail, inside and out. He couldn’t find a scratch, blemish, or the slightest imperfection; he was a happy man.

He babied his new car, carefully following the instructions in the owner’s manual, and before he took the car out each day, he performed an abbreviated 15-minute inspection. All was good until the seventh day. When Nicholas reached the final area of inspection, the lower left-hand corner of the windshield, a jolt of alarm shot through his chest, What is that? Nicholas scrutinized the suspicious area, Is that just a light reflection or a tiny crack?

Unable to differentiate between the two with the naked eye, Nicholas uncased his 2.50 power reading glasses. Twenty minutes later, he was still on the fence between light reflection and tiny crack. The next step was the small magnifying glass with a built-in light that his mother had used to help her read. Getting his hands on that device required a trip to the attic and a search through the mom-memorabilia box. He smiled when he saw it; the design on the surface was whimsical, sketches of yellow reading glasses of different shapes on a black background. Of course, the two 3V batteries were worn out.

He didn’t want to risk driving with a cracked windshield, so he walked to the closest hardware store. Forty minutes and $7.95 later, he was back at the windshield with the lighted magnifier. The glare from the light only muddied the waters, and the magnification in the device was no better than in his reading glasses. He thought of his rarely used handheld magnifying glass. I think that it’s in one of my desk drawers, but it required a deep dive through several of them before he unearthed it. After 20 minutes examining the target area under the magnifying glass, Nicholas remained dead center on the decision fence.

Astonished to see that he had been at it for 2 ½ hours, he called in sick. This project was going to take some time.

Nicholas thought about advancing the microscope-level magnification. He was most familiar with the hobby-level model that he had used as a kid. He might still have a more modern version, bought for one of his kids, in storage. He remembered spending hours viewing home-made slides of handy specimens, like hairs and liquids, and methodically working through the commercial slide sets, mostly of insects, which came neatly lined up in a nifty wooden case. A microscope would up the magnifying power by orders of magnitude, but how to get the windshield under the lens?

I could remove the windshield. He had seen it done on the street when cracked windshields were being replaced by commercial services. It involved a bar with two suction cups. He could watch a YouTube Video and buy the necessary tools. He examined the rubber gasket around the windshield. It was a tight, seamless fit. Even if I get it out without ruining it, I’ll never get it back in the right way… Binoculars! Much more convenient, and I’ve got the pair that we use to admire Anna’s hummingbirds that nervously momentarily stop at our feeder.

The binoculars didn’t help. They were designed to magnify relatively distant objects, not objects a few inches away.

I’ve got it, my smartphone camera! It can make things look five times closer. He employed it in the crack hunt at different magnifications, at different distances, with the phone’s light on, and with it off. He had a detailed view of the grain of the top of the dashboard, but no clarity as to the presence or absence of a scratch on the windshield. He learned from the internet that the most recent version of his phone was capable of 50 times magnification. Two hours and $1,400 later, he was standing in front of the windshield with his new smartphone.

Ignoring the hunger pains, Nicholas worked through lunchtime, trying various combinations of camera magnification, distance, and lighting. He couldn’t see any cracks, but he had an even finer-grained view of the dashboard. He was seriously considering a lunch break when it came into view—A CRACK! Thoughts of eating vanished as he fine-tuned his view. The crack was ugly, irregular, and craggy. It reminded him of a visit to the dentist years ago. The dentist had displayed Nicholas’ cavity on a monitor mounted on the wall, as if it were a thrilling documentary about scaling Mt. Everest. He also imagined that cancer cells might look like this under the microscope–invasive, out-of-control, lethal. That image led him to vow to eliminate the crack, no matter what it took.

After some internet research, Nicholas had a new plan, it involved cleaning, polishing, and buffing. An hour and a half later, he was back from the auto supply shop with the necessary equipment. More or less three hours later, Nicholas sat behind the wheel staring at an irregular zone of smudged crack fixing gone wrong, where the nearly invisible crack once lay. Maybe I’ll have to call in sick again tomorrow.

He considered his next move. Joy had been displaced by smudgy imperfection. His world view had constricted to the crack and ill-fated repair, trivial in actual size and all encompassing in psychic importance. He doubted that he could drive safely with so little usable mental bandwidth. I could replace the windshield or trade the car in. The used-car dealerships are making good deals these days.

In his distracted and distraught state, Nicholas preferred to let someone else drive. He directed his retired neighbor to the closest used-car dealership. He hoped to find a late model for around the same price he would get for his damaged vehicle. He worried about how much less they would offer him because of the flawed windshield. He filled out the requisite forms and had an offer within 13 minutes of walking through the dealership’s sliding glass doors. Not bad, only about 20% less than I paid for it.

He looked for a replacement on the lot; a one-year-old metallic goldish sporty model caught his eye. He looked at his neighbor, smiled, and said, “I can see myself in this. Hang on while I inspect it.”