On the Road

I was haunted by a recurring nightmare as a child. It didn’t come out of nowhere. My parents had very little money when my brother and I were very young, and as a result, we made our way around town in a beat-up, coppery-brown hatchback of make and model I cannot recall, but suffice it to say, it was a piece of junk.

One day, my mother needed to either pick something up or drop something off at my aunt’s house, so she left me and my brother in the car parked in the driveway out front while she made a quick run up to the front door. Apparently the emergency break in this old junker wasn’t up to snuff, because as we sat there in the car, it began to roll slowly — almost imperceptibly — backwards. And then it started to pick up a little speed. And then we started to scream.

Our mom caught the car in time and everything was fine — she had just been a few feet away on the front porch. But evidently that experience stuck with me. For the next 10 years, give or take, I had the same nightmare every couple of months: my brother and I were in the parked car waiting for our mother, when the car began to roll backward. But the laws of physics do not apply in the dream world, and instead of just rolling backward into the street and eventually coming to a stop, the car instead rolled forward down the street, picking up speed as it went. And then it rolled onto the highway of its own volition. And then it was…