The odometer

Six digits, sometimes seven, arranged in a row behind glass that has not been cleaned since the vehicle left the factory floor. The number only advances. It has never, in any documented case, moved backward under its own power, though history records attempts by less scrupulous hands to persuade it otherwise, attempts that federal law now treats with appropriate severity. Mechanical versions click over digit by digit, a small parade of wheels each waiting its turn, the ones place spinning fast enough to blur, the hundred-thousands place so rarely troubled that some owners never see it move at all. Digital versions simply change, no ceremony, no click, the lesser of the two by a purely sentimental measure that nobody pretends is technical. One was observed turning from ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine to one hundred thousand on a stretch of interstate outside Terre Haute. The driver did not notice. The odometer did. Five nines becoming six digits is not a small thing mechanically, five wheels turning in the same half second, and it happened at seventy-one miles an hour without so much as a change in engine note. The car did not slow down to mark the occasion, which is correct behavior for a car. The odometer marked it the only way it can, by adding one and moving on, and was already three miles past it by the time anyone thought to look.

R. Quist