#its exactly like that guy who rolls a boulder up a hill. size of boulder and length of hill vary

[artisticmenace]

getting better is just as hard as what made you worse. its easy to sink down into the pits of your own mind. it isnt easy to wake up. but the sun is brighter when your head is above the ground and its still true that things get easier after you get better. im not great yet, but im getting there. im still trying to let myself talk to people.

[hypnoticwinter]

Down the Rabbit Hole part 2

At first I don't know what woke me, but then I feel a buzzing somewhere on the bed and I grope around blindly for the phone until I find it and bring it to my ear. "Hello?" I say, feeling horribly groggy.

"Hi, Roan, honey."

"Dad?" I ask, sitting up straighter. I squint at the clock on the bedside table. It's not actually as late as I thought it was, only one in the morning. I yawn and crack my jaw accidentally. "Ouch."

"Are you okay? Is this a bad time?"

"No, no, I'm fine. What's up? Isn't it late there?"

"It's only two in the morning. Your mother and I just got finished watching a season of West Wing and I thought I'd call you, see how you're doing."

"West Wing is still going?"

"No, no, it's just the latest show we're watching. We just got through with season three. How are you, honey?"

"I'm good."

There's a brief pause.

"Yeah, you're good? I'm glad, I'm glad to hear that. We, ah, we think about you pretty often."

"Yeah, I think about you guys too. How's mom doing?"

"She's good, she's good. She got through with that last operation and, you know, she was really out of it for, ah, for a couple of weeks, but she's all rested up now and she's – she's doing a lot better."

"That's great, I'm glad."

I get up, slip on some sandals, and push the door open, making sure I've tucked the room key into my pocket, and let the night air swallow me up. I lean on the second-floor railing just outside my room and look up and down the row of rooms; ordinarily you'd expect to see at least one or two chain-smoking Latinos out there burning the midnight oil, at least judging by my experiences with similar motels in the past, but it's completely deserted, just like the rest of Gumption.

"What are you up to these days? Are you still working for that paper down in Corpus Christi?"

"Yeah, the Star-Tribune."

"How's that going?"

"It's good."

"Yeah? That's good, that's good."

Another silence passes. I close my eyes. "How about you?" I ask. "How's everything at the shop?”

"Oh, it's fine. I guess it’s car crash season, now that it’s summer. We’ve been very busy. I just wish it wasn’t so hot."

"You and everybody else."

"Right," he laughs. "So yeah, that's alright. It’s good money, at least, we’re bringing it in hand over fist. And then in a couple of months your mother and I are going to go visit Alan and Margaret in Louisville like we always do.”

"I keep asking you to get me one of those little bats and you never do."

"Well, I have five of them sitting in my closet back home, if you'd come and visit once in a while."

This conversation, as it usually does, is steering in a direction I don't much like. "Well," I say briskly, "I'm glad mom's doing okay. And you seem to be doing alright as well."

"I wish you'd call more."

"Well, you know, I'm busy."

"Too busy to call your parents?" he asks, and I roll my eyes.

"Well, you know," I start, but he sighs heavily.

"Forget it," he says. "I just wish you'd talk to us more."

I think, not for the first time, of the letter laying on the floor of my apartment, five hundred or so miles away. I lick my lips and try to ignore the cold drip of apprehension at the pit of my stomach. "Dad, I –" I start, and then I trail off.

There, below me and just barely out of reach of the tall streetlights, someone is walking purposefully into the desert, headed straight for the far-off smudge on the horizon that marks the Mystery Flesh Pit.

"Roan, I think we lost connection. Roan? Can you hear me?"

I hang up the call. I spend only a moment thinking before I hustle down the stairs and, quickly thumbing the phone to silent, head into the desert as well, my eyes glued to the bobbing pinprick of a flashlight there in the desert ahead of me.

I made the decision before I had a chance to rationalize it and talk myself out of it. I have my phone, I guess, so I'll be able to record audio, but the camera is still in my room, as is my good voice recorder. Keeping an eye on the light ahead of me I sneak the top of my phone out of my pocket and look at the battery; somewhere close to sixty percent, and I know the voice-recording app that I use eats the hell out of the battery, so I probably won't get more than thirty minutes of audio out of it.

I'm not dressed properly at all and while it isn't unbearably cold I know it's going to get to me after a while. I kick myself inwardly but I'm already about a half-mile out of town, and maybe a half-mile behind the guy, so there's no point to me turning back now. I stamp down the rising head of fear in my stomach – what if I step on a scorpion and it stings me? What if I run into that homeless guy from the drainage ditch and he rapes me?

That last one, at least, I think, would have its own form of justice to it.

Whoever this guy is, he isn't making any effort to hide his movements. Although it isn't quite sandy enough for me to be able to just follow his tracks, he isn't getting down to prevent himself from silhouetting starkly against the starry backdrop of the West Texas hills, and he isn't, as best as I can tell, checking to see if he's being followed. At least, the flashlight he's holding never swings around to point towards me, although I think I'm far enough away from him that he wouldn't be able to see me even if he did look back.

The walk turns into a trudge. It's a long way to the Mystery Flesh Pit; not an impossible walk, but long. I keep losing my footing and tripping over myself and more and more this seems to be becoming a bad idea. How am I going to find my way back? I turn and look behind me, hoping to see Gumption in the distance, but if it's visible it's behind one of the slumping hills we crossed about twenty minutes ago. I want to rest but clearly this guy isn't quite as tired as I am, despite it being...two in the morning already. Christ.

At least I have all day to try and track down the librarian's brother. I'll be able to sleep in, maybe take a bubble bath...assuming I make it back to the hotel safely.

Ahead of me the guy clicks off his light and I freeze; for a moment I think he's spotted me but once I squint I can make out that he's still moving ahead, just without the light now. Before I can wonder why that is, exactly, I realize that ahead of both of us, partially masked by the nearest hill, there's another, brighter light. I drop to my stomach as it turns and points in my direction, and I see the man I've been following hold up a hesitant hand in greeting.

I pull myself forward and up onto a sort of berm and see a small gathering of people, five in total, all centered around one man, holding a much more powerful flashlight than the man I'd been following had, one of those low-slung heavy-duty jobs. I squint harder, trying to will my eyes to work like binoculars.

The guy in the middle is talking, looking between the four others. From this angle their faces are shrouded in darkness, I can't make them out at all, but there's something familiar the one in the middle. I wonder if I've seen him in town somewhere, if I've walked past him on the street...

Oh. Of course.

The face I'm staring at clicks into place and I realize that the man in the center of the circle, looking around at the others seriously, like a leader, is the hobo I saw hiding in the drainage ditch on the way back from the Mystery Flesh Pit.

They're moving now, the light clicked off, all of them ducked down into a low crouch, the man who I'd thought was a hobo leading the way. I can't tell which of them is the man I'd followed now, they distance and the darkness has made them all too uniform for such distinctions.

We crest two hills like this, them leading, cautiously, stopping when the man in front raises his hand and going when he puts it back down again, myself trailing along behind, half-bent and cautious, before we slip over a third hill and I flatten down again, for there, ahead of us, is the tall, electrified fence surrounding the remains of the Mystery Flesh Pit.

There are fewer lights than I would have expected. They're dotted every hundred yards or so, tall imposing fixtures that provide wells of pallid, fluorescent light but leave great blistering swaths of darkness between. There's no trail or road alongside the outside of the fence, but I think I can make out one on the inside, wide enough for two cars abreast, perhaps. It seems utterly deserted. I wonder if I ought to have covered my face, to try and baffle any cameras there might be, but the group ahead of me doesn't seem to be concerned about that, so I put the thought aside.

We've come at the fence at an oblique angle, far away from the main gate, which I can just barely see in the distance, well-lit and secure-looking.

Between the moonlight and the lamps I should be able to tell what the group does from this hill. I sit down, dangle my legs over the side before drawing them in beneath me Indian-style; it's too cold for anything else. At least I have the sweater that I'd slipped on before taking that phone call from my dad outside, but my bare legs are freezing.

The group ahead of me hustles over to the fence, to a small boulder nearly resting against it, and the man in the lead sets the unlit black box of the flashlight down on the ground and rolls up his sleeves and then picks up the boulder and sets it aside. I blink at that but then I realize as it falls over and he reaches down to steady it that it's hollow, like one of those fake boulders they sell at Home Depot to put over utility meters and pipes and stuff in your lawn. Beneath it is...

I again feel that same prickly feeling working its way up my spine. I can feel my mouth drop open loosely.

Beneath it is a dark, yawning mouth of a tunnel, large enough, perhaps, for an average-sized man if he were to drop on his belly and crawl through it. The leader of the group turns to the others and gestures, saying something to them. He seems to be describing a long, crescent arc, and then he points downwards, and the others nods. He pats one of them on the back and stands up, away from the tunnel, and then, one after the other, the rest of them crawl through. When the last one is through, he puts the rock back, picks up the flashlight, and hurries away from the fence, heading straight towards me.

"Damn," I growl under my breath, looking around for a place to hide. There's a bush off to the left that might conceal me if I get behind it quick enough...

I scurry backwards as quickly as I dare while he walks towards the incline of the hill, still looking off towards the main gates, and then once I've put the lip of the hill between him and me, I roll onto my hands and knees and clamber behind the bush. Fifteen seconds later, as well as roughly thirty of my rushing heartbeats, I’m still waiting. I look around quickly, wondering if he changed his course, but I see nothing, the bare rocky hill face is utterly bare. I creep forward a little, as quickly as I dare, trying to look over the edge, but I can’t reach it without getting out from behind the bush entirely.

“God dammit,” I mutter, glancing around nervously. My heart is throbbing heavily in my chest but I try to will myself to calmness. He just - went another way. It only looked as though he were heading straight for me, that’s all. He went a different way, changed his mind, went to go get something. There’s nothing that -

From very close behind me I hear a small mechanical click that I immediately recognize as the cocking back of the hammer of a handgun. Everything goes very still and silent and I raise my hands slowly, not daring to look behind me.

“Get up,” a harsh male voice says. A flashlight clicks on and throws my shadow far out in front of me. I can feel my hands trembling; my jaw shakes as though I were frostbitten. I feel like I might throw up.

I slowly get to my feet. “P-please don’t -“ I start, but the man cuts me off.

“Hands clasped on the back of your head.”

I link my fingers together and do as he says. “I don’t have any money,” I tell him.

“This isn’t a robbery,” he says, and the stab of fear I feel twists, somewhere deep down inside of me.

“If y-you touch me, I’ll -“

“Shut up,” he tells me. “Start walking. That way.”

I glance back to see where he’s pointing and after a moment of hesitation, seeing no way out of it, I put one shaky foot in front of the other and walk.

 * * *

 After about fifteen minutes or so he tells me to stop. I’m still shivering, both from the cold and from the fear. We are very, very far out in the desert now; if he were to shoot me out here, probably I’d never be found.

“Turn around,” he orders. I do so, squinting against the glare of the flashlight. There is a long, long silence and then he sets it down at his feet. He’s holding the gun low at his hip. His finger is outside the trigger guard, I notice.

“I don’t have any money,” I tell him again.

“And I told you this isn’t a robbery,” he says. “Who sent you?”

“Who sent me?” I ask. The question doesn’t make any sense to me.

“Yes. Who was it, FBI? NPS? The Company itself?” I can see his dark eyes shift as he looks me up and down. “I must say, whoever it is, they pick some very underwhelming field agents.”

“Field agents?” I blurt. “You’ve got the wrong idea -“

“Look,” he growls, “there’s no point denying it. There’s no other reason for you to be following me out here. So let’s just cut to the chase. You know who I am. Who sent you?”

“I - I really have no idea at all who you are,” I tell him. I look at him very seriously, willing him to believe me, and I think I seem him falter a little.

“What are you doing out here, then?” he asks.

I open my mouth, then close it again. I shake my head. “It’s a long story.”

“Tell it.”

“I’m a reporter,” I tell him. “I found out about the Pit a few days ago and I decided to come down and see it. Stayed in Lubbock for a little bit, got some tips, some people to talk to, that kind of thing. Earlier today, I drove out here, took some pictures of the fence. Then this evening, I saw someone walking out into the desert beelining for the Pit, and I decided to follow him. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” he asks.

“Swear. I’m not - I don’t know who you thought I was, but I’m not here for you. I’m looking for some guy named Peter,” I laugh. “Apparently he works at the 7/11 in town, he used to be a ranger, he was there on the Fourth when the - when the disaster happened. I ran into his sister at the library in Lubbock, she tipped me off. Wanted to ask him some questions about it, maybe do an interview.”

The man is looking at me very strangely indeed. I shake my head. “I know it sounds crazy,” I say, “but that’s all I have to go off.”

“You’re looking for a man named Peter?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Who works at the 7/11?”

“Yes.”

“Because you want to…interview him about the 2007 disaster?”

“Yes,” I say. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

He stares at me for a while longer and then shrugs. “Well,” he says, tucking the gun back into his waistband, “you found me.”

 * * *

 "So how long did you know I was following you?" I ask. I take another puff of the cigarette and hold it, then let it out. He shrugs.

"I noticed one of my...guests had a tail, but I paid attention to you and you didn't act like a cop."

"I'm not a cop."

"I know."

He has a low, gravelly voice, but it has a mellowness to it that doesn't make it quite so unpleasant to listen to. He glances over at me every now and then but for the most part keeps his eyes glued to the fence, to the buildings beyond, to the vast expanse of desert within the fence beyond the buildings. He looks over at me. He has very dark eyes and a rough, coarse beard. He hasn’t yet apologized for pulling a gun on me but with the gun away I can feel myself relaxing a little, like this is a perfectly normal conversation and surroundings and time.

Peter takes a long drag on his cigarette and then examines it. His eyes cut over at me.

“Corpus Christi is a long way away,” he remarks.

“Not a very long plane ride,” I point out.

"Even so,” he nods. “Long way to go on a whim."

"I –" I start, and then stop, shrug at him again. "It didn't feel like it was real," I say, going through it slowly in my head. I need to make sure I have my story straight. "I had never, ever heard of this place before, and I grew up here. Not here here but in Texas. I thought it was a hoax or something but the more research I did the more I couldn't deny that there was something here."

"So you flew all the way out here to look at the fence and then go back?"

I look at him, wondering if he's getting at something. "I guess," I say after a moment. "I was thinking that maybe there'd be something here I could do a story on but it seems like all of this is ancient history now."

He laughs. "For some people it is. For others it isn't."

I look at him. "Why are you smuggling people inside the fence?"

He's silent for a moment. When he answers me it's with a question. "When you were doing all your research," he asks, "did you come across a recording of the news that day?"

"Yeah," I say, remembering it. "It was CNN, I think."

"What did you see?"

"Well...I saw a pit, full of blood, and all of the emergency vehicles, and –"

"Was it daytime?"

"Uh. Yeah, it was. Why?"

He looks at me significantly. "The disaster happened a little after midnight on the Fourth. That video was taken the next day, on the fifth."

I frown. "Wait..."

"That's right, work it out."

"Why wasn't there video of it that night?"

"Oh, there was. But it was never broadcast. Same as all the photographs journalists took that night, those were never published."

"What? Why?"

"Because of two things – first, the disaster was horribly mismanaged, and a lot of people died or got hurt who didn't need to, and secondly, because of something that happened later on, after everything was calming down."

"Which was?"

He licks his lips and looks at me. "You could just drop this and let it go. You weren't there, you don't have any connection to this place," he says, gesturing behind himself in the direction of the fence. "Least I don't figure you do."

"You're right, I don't."

"So why? Why bother?"

"I just found it fascinating. I wanted to learn more about it the moment I heard of it." I briefly relate the story of being stuck in the traffic jam and what lead me to make my way down to Gumption, and he shakes his head.

"I'll only tell you this once," he says. "You'd better get out of here."

"Is that a threat?"

"Not from me. But if you stick around you aren't going to like what you find."

I take a deep breath, let it out. I feel very calm, like a still lake is inside of me, untroubled by ripples. "Tell me what happened on the night of the disaster."

He shrugs. "About forty people who'd been injured and put in a field hospital right on the edge of the pit, after everything had died down, got up and walked to the Pit, got down to the orifice, and threw themselves in."

"What?"

"Just what I said. I don't suppose you found that fact in any of the research you did, huh?"

"No," I shake my head. "No, I didn't. But why, why did they –"

"I was there," he says softly. "I was in one of those field hospitals and I watched the woman in the bed next to mine get up, even though she had an acid burn all down her leg that would have made it impossible to stand without excruciating pain, and walk out the hospital. I couldn't move, they had me in a cast rigged up to the bedframe, I'd broken my leg getting out of the Pit."

"Did she say anything?"

"Didn't say a damn thing, didn't even look at me. She was walking like she was in a dream."

"Why did she do it? Do you know?"

"She felt it calling to her."

"Is that what that sign's about, over there by the gate?" I ask. He nods.

"Yeah. Used to be a lot of people would wander up, try and get in. That's why it's an electric fence now."

"How widespread is this?"

"Depends on how you look at it. Not very many people know about it. They took it off of the incident report that was released to the public, none of the newspapers or websites mention it. They’ve done a very good job of burying it."

"Why?"

"Why do you think?"

"Cause people would get scared," I mutter, more to myself than to him. "We like to think that we're special, that we aren't animals, but something that can manipulate our minds..."

"Exactly. So they just get rid of it, hope that nobody ever finds out about it."

"But if this many people go missing –"

"I don't think it affects everybody in the same way, or at all. The more sensitive you are, the more emotional, creative, and intelligent you are, the harder it hits you. But it might just be an obsession for a few months before it fades, or it might turn into a pathology, and those are the people who either can't take it any more and kill themselves, or they make their way here."

"And you let them inside the fence."

"Yeah."

"What happens to them, in there?" I ask, jerking my chin towards the Pit. He shrugs.

"One of two things. Either the guards catch them, in which case I don't know what happens to them, or they make it to the Pit."

"And?"

"And if they make it to the Pit, they either chicken out, if it isn't such a severe case that they literally can't any more, or they throw themselves in."

"And you help them do this?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because if it's at that point, either way it'll be a mercy to them."

"What? How do you know?"

Peter chews on his moustache for a moment. I study him carefully. He looks…kind. It’s not what I had expected.

"I used to be one of them."

"What?" I say again. "I can't believe this story you're telling me, it's macabre."

"It's the truth. You're writing a story on this? Gonna put it in the paper?"

"I don't know," I tell him. "I thought I might but the more I learn the more I think I won't."

"Good," he nods. "They'll get you if you do. Bad idea."

"They?"

"You know. They. Capital T."

"The Powers that Be."

"Sure."

"So you help people kill themselves?" I ask. He doesn't look so threatening, now that I've been talking to him for fifteen minutes or so, but he's still a man and I'm a woman, he's still stronger than me just intrinsically, even without the gun. Stupid, stupid Roan, not taking any sort of weapon with her...not that I have one to begin with.

"It's more complicated than that."

"So it's about money?"

"Hell no. I don't take a dime from 'em."

"So tell me."

"This is your last chance to get out. You can go home, you aren't tangled in this yet."

"I'm not going anywhere."

He smiles then, and I smile back, I can't help it. There's a grinding sound, over beyond the fence, and we both look over; a Humvee is driving past, floodlight swinging back and forth along the fence. He nods. "That's the patrol. That means at least one of them made it to the Pit."

"They don't have regular patrols?"

"If you only knew what budget cuts have done to that place. See that fence? Ten thousand volts? They don't even power it any more. Too expensive. They leave all the signs up to try and dissuade people but it never works. All those cameras? Most of 'em are broken, or fake, I can't tell which. Too expensive. They're running on fumes in there. There's no research any more, no search for a permanent solution, they just keep the plant running to keep the thing asleep and keep taking the ballast out."

"Ballast?" I blurt. “They’re still taking it out?”

“Of course,” he says, giving me a look. “Not like they’re going to stop making a buck off the thing if they can help it.”

“I read online that they’d stopped taking it out,” I mutter. “Where does it go?” I ask. “If they’re taking it out.”

He shrugs. “I can’t say for certain. I think probably it goes to the highest bidder. And to my understanding, those bids can get very high.”

“Okay, but -“

Peter shakes his head. "It ain't safe out here. We'll talk tomorrow, alright?"

I nod. "Okay. How will I - ?"

"Come by the 7/11, it's dead all night, guarantee it. We can talk about whatever you want. Just…be careful."

“Of what?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Just - be careful. Don’t let anybody else know why you’re here. That’s all.”

“What do you mean - ?“

“Not now,” he says, then he gets up, starts to walk back towards town. "Come on," he says, turning back around when I don't move. "It isn't safe out here this late," he repeats. "I'll guide you back to town."

We walk in silence for a long while. I shiver to myself quietly, staring at Peter’s broad back. “You know, I didn’t think this little adventure would go like it did,” I mention. Peter lets out a little snort.

“How did you think it’d go?”

“Um. I guess I didn’t think much about it at all.”

“You ought to be more careful,” he tells me, glancing back at me. “I mean, following a stranger out into the desert is a pretty bad idea, no matter how you look at it.”

I swallow hard, try and give him a flippant shrug. I think I don’t make my eyes as insouciant as I’d like; I can see his gaze flicker up to mine for a moment before he turns back around and keeps walking. “Good way for someone to hold you up with a gun,” I suggest, and he laughs.

“I’m sorry about that,” he says. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought that you must have been on to me, I figured you were from the National Parks Service or the FBI or something.”

“Would you have killed me if I was?” I ask, eyeing him. He stops.

“I’m not a killer,” he says.

“What would you have done, then? If I was?”

“I don’t know,” he admits after a moment. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

I just shake my head and keep walking. Peter follows me after a moment.

“Did my sister say anything?” he asks after a while. “When you met her in the library, I mean. I know it must have been her you talked to, nobody else would have known to send you to look for me.”

I think about it for a moment. "She's sorry," I tell him.

"She told you to tell me that?"

"More or less."

"More or less?"

"Well, she told me that if I mentioned she'd sent me looking for you you probably wouldn't tell me anything."

He laughs at that, long and mirthless. "Yeah, that's my sister," he says. "Come on."

The walk back to town is long and cold and surprisingly scary, considering that about halfway through we heard what we both thought was a cougar (mountain lion, catamount, puma, painter, shadow cat, panther...) off in the distance and we both froze. I felt myself huddling closer to Peter, grievously aware of the goosebumps pebbling my legs and arms. We looked at each other for a moment then said nothing. I hoped he wouldn't get the wrong idea.

I try to say something to him when we get back to the motel but he just looks at me and nods and walks off. I realize I don’t know what I was going to say anyway. Eventually I call after him.

"Hey, what time tomorrow?"

He turns around, still walking, and shrugs. "After five," he calls back.

"You want me to bring anything for you?"

He frowns. "Like what?"

"I don't know, dinner?"

Peter waves his hand. “Do whatever you like,” he says, and then he passes around the corner and is gone. I start to yell something after him but instead I just shake my head and go back up the stairs to my room. Inside I flop into bed and then roll over onto my back, stare up at the popcorn ceiling lurking ominously above me, blow a long breath out.

I have two missed calls from my dad, back from when I put the phone on silent, right before I began this whole adventure. I double-tap the icon so that it calls him back, and then after a second I shake my head and hang up the call.

“Fuck it,” I say out loud.

Then I roll over onto my side and try to sleep.

Continue with Part 3

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[robertkstone]

2019 Honda Insight First Drive: Third Try’s A Charm

Strapping into the original 2000-model-year Honda Insight, I was never more certain about anything: This will be a hit.

Man oh man, here’s the first hybrid sold in America. It’s a radically aluminum, slippery teardrop of a two-seater that looks like an eye-catching cross between a Chiclet and a space-pod dropped from Venus. Brilliant, brilliant car. And in the end, a few engineering professors did in fact, buy them—but there’s only so many of those, and then it quietly disappeared.

In 2009, I stared at the words “All-New Second-Generation Honda Insight.” This was in the context of a showdown with the recently redesigned, third-generation Prius. What can I say—my only defense for picking the four-door, five-seat Honda the winner was temporary insanity. I was way too enthusiastic about its cheapskate cost of ownership during the frightening downdraft of the Great Recession, and not nearly disturbed enough by its otherwise dreariness. In the end, a few car-hating accountants bought them—but there’s only so many of those, and then it quietly disappeared.

So here I am pecking out the words “Honda Insight” for a third time. A bit nervously, too, I’ll admit. If I screw this one up, who knows what’s going to happen. Perhaps I’ll have my writer epaulettes ripped from my shirt sleeves and be pushed out of the car-guy treehouse. However, just maybe, Honda—and I—have finally learned our lesson: A successful car’s gotta be more than a one-trick pony. It’s reassuring, then, that Honda’s packed the 2019 Insight with both the first edition’s caliber of technology and the second generation’s equally compelling value proposition.

For starters, it recycles the full-hybrid blueprints already used in its bigger brothers—the latest Accord Hybrid and Clarity Plug-In hybrid—but simply shrunk everything to about 75 percent scale. The gas engine is a 107-hp 1.5-liter four-cylinder (Atkinson cycle, naturally) with its crankshaft offset to decrease rubbing friction. Most of the time, it spins a generator to energize a 129-hp traction motor. But during highway cruising it might instead find itself simply clutched to the drive wheels via a solitary gear ratio to cut out the electrical middlemen to produce maximum efficiency. If the traffic gets feisty, pressing the accelerator pedal past a subtle (admonishing) resistance point (at 75 percent of its travel) soars the engine revs to make maximum juice and acceleration. And when you’re trying to keep a low profile, there’s an EV mode for briefly slinking through the neighborhood when you get home, um, a bit too late.

The other driving modes are the usual trio of suspects: Eco, Normal, and Sport. Each is software-tailored for its own accelerator alertness and enthusiasm for climate controlling. But it’s the cabin’s repertoire of customizable augmented acoustics that grabbed my attention even more: On top of the always-on sound-cancellation of road rumble, any anomalous change in the 1.5-liter’s volume as its rpm changes is artificially smoothed (satisfying our subconscious expectation that the engine’s volume should steadily climb with revs). Then, in Sport mode, there’s even an additional texture—a subtle snarl layered onto what’s, when naked, simply a thin, raspy exhaust. The effect is rather appealing, actually. Except for the occasional long incline when everything gets entirely too raucous.

With 151 system hp, this feels like a fairly brisk car, and Honda’s probably right when it says the Insight will walk away from a Prius. Yet it’ll do that while being nearly as efficient, too; its LX and EX versions (wearing 215/55 R16 tires) return a triumphant 55/49/52 mpg city/highway/combined (that ebbs slightly to 51/45/48 for the top-drawer Touring version rolling on 215/50 R17s). Here’s the eye-opener: Corrected to contemporary EPA methodology, that first-generation teardrop Insight produced mpgs of 49/61/53 city/highway/combined—a single combined mpg better than this loaded-with-features (and modern crash-safety tech), five-passenger sedan that exhibits virtually none of the polarizing bodywork of aerodynamic sculpting.

The car that surrounds the spiffy drivetrain is a mostly reskinned Civic to visually differentiate it, meaning it’s still a practical five-seater with a notably big back seat and a nice-sized, 15.1-cubic-foot trunk. To maximize those cubic feet, Honda situated the hybrid system’s small, lithium-ion battery under the rear seat, shrinking the tank size to 10.6 gallons (though that’s largely offset by the car’s stingy fuel consumption). And Honda’s trunk team defended its cargo capacity through some unorthodox packaging elsewhere. Snooping under the hood, I paused. Where’s the battery? There’s nothing but hybrid guts in the engine bay. I checked the trunk. Nothing there, either. It turns out that the battery is inside the cabin, under the shifter, where somebody realized there was a little bit of room doing nothing.

On the road, the 2019 Insight seems more solid and drives more fluidly than the tenth-generation Civic platform it’s based on. Although its extra sound deadening didn’t subdue the tires’ occasional yowls on grooved concrete highway, it’s way calmer inside than I expected. Its ride is better isolated via hydraulic front suspension bushings (that are even cooled by little underfloor air scoops), and the front, lower L-arms are redesigned for less longitudinal stiffness (for more relaxed bump compliance) but stiffer laterally for crisper steering feel.

The steering itself is variable-ratio, having happily exorcised of the common demons of nonlinearity, while providing quicker responses near lock for zippy parking. At the other extreme—carving through windy back-road hills—steering turn-in is sweetened by a lighter aluminum hood and the subtle antics of the inside front wheel’s brake pads, which can lightly scuff their disc to amplify yaw. Try to drive dead-straight down a strongly cambered road, and the electrically assisted steering will eventually notice your subtle efforts to countersteer and add its own torque to compensate. Stopping a hybrid often means brake pedal feel that’s as predictable as stepping into a bouncy-house, but this one has kudos-worthy linearity, backed by three-setting, easy-reach finger-tap paddles behind the steering wheel.

Indeed, the list of sophisticated standard features here is roll call of greatest hits: adaptive cruise control (down to 0 mph), lane centering, auto high-beams, a multi-angle rearview camera, traffic sign recognition, collision-mitigation braking, heated side mirrors; the EX and Touring versions get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, SiriusXM satellite radio, SMS text messaging, and plenty more.

At prices stepping from $23,725 for the LX, $24,995 for the EX, and $28,985 for the Touring, it seems that the third time’s finally the charm, right? Not so fast.

Despite all its good stuff—fabulous features, even more fabulous mileage, interior spaciousness, completely unexpected driving sophistication, and sheer technological terrificness—Honda is pushing a boulder uphill by debuting a sedan exactly when other carmakers are axing some of theirs. Moreover, it’s risking cannibalizing its two existing, world-class sedans—the Civic and Accord—that still sell well by threading a complicating needle between them. Things will only get harder if gas prices drop, too.

The first- and second-generation Insights failed due to overspecialization; this one risks having learned that lesson too well. It’s a Swiss Army knife of a car: great at so many things that its audience has left the elevator by the time it’s done making its pitch. Which would be a shame because, after 18 years, it’s a story lots of people would enjoy.

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