I was sitting back again in my recliner, relaxed, working on manuscript draft #4. That’s when it happened. That’s when it always happens. Every night at 9:50 p.m. It begins with the heavy click of a clunky switch: “thunk.” And then the faint whine begins: the whine of the motor straining to lift and of the tiny white wheels crunching under weight. The whine—always the whine. The whine grows louder and louder as the chair climbs the stairs, coming closer and closer, ever closer. With each inch, with each 100^th of a decibel, my nerves tense and clamp. She is coming. The chair nears its landing, and the whine of the motor grows louder and feels like cicadas stuffed in my ears. And just as I think I will scream, the chair stops with the thwack of another sticky switch and the angry shout of an airhorn in my brain. When the $14,000 chair came, it came as a blessing: it carried my father between floors for two years until he died, and has carried my mother for two years more. Four years of hearing that chair, with the “thunk” of its starting switch, with the ascending crescendoing whine, with the thwack of its ending switch, and the crack of its beep like a bullet. I hate that chair. I hate that whine. I hate that “thunk” and that thwack, that bullet crack. And the worst of it is that if I want to leave the house, for any reason at all, ever, with my leg in a boot, unable to walk for six months, I have to ride that blessed cursed chair, enveloped in the god-awful whine, knowing that bullet beep will come at the end.