Too Many Dreams
- Oct 23, 2017
- 4 min read
by Caitlin Hoffman
Vicky was a twenty-year-old Business Major who didn’t believe in ghosts — until a 1974 Jeep Cherokee parked itself on her lawn.
Vicky lived in one of those charmingly dilapidated house shares between the North Side and the University. The house came with 1.5 bathrooms and three roommates: one Physics Major, one Pre-Med, and one Artier-Than-Thou Music Theorist. Vicky swallowed pride, paid rent ($515, plus Internet), and kept the heck to herself.
The Big City was only a means to an end. Yet as the days lingered, and the piles of dishes got pile-ier, the end to Vicky’s means seemed farther and farther away.
Vicky was losing sleep. Even worse, she was remembering dreams, at times so vividly she’d wake in a sweat, traumatised.
Vicky didn’t remember dreams. All she wanted was a self-sustained, rich-ass life free of sententious, sniffling housemates, and especially free of jeeps that drove themselves to one's front door and stayed.
Everyone knew it came for her. Surely as they’d seen it mosey onto the property, guzzle contentedly and click its engine off, they knew it came for Vicky.
All the work she’d done to rock her Passing Privilege all the way to Top Honours — shattered by some lousy rezjeep.
The jeep SCREAMED rez. Shabby hood. Tree-bashed vents. License plate drowned in mud. Years of abuse, misuse, love, hunting trips, camping trips, teenage trysts, car accidents, all rubbed and kneaded in.
A past not even hers.
And still it came to haunt her.
After the third day, her roommates got nervous.
“Are you gonna get rid of it?” Trust-Fund-Rockboy asked.
“It’s. Not. Mine!” she’d insist, stomping upstairs with the Business Section.
But it was hers. Nobody else could go near it. Ms. Smart-n-Pretty fell back five feet when she attempted approach. The car wasn’t violent, per se, but made it clear Ms. Smart-n-Pretty was extraneous.
Mr. Nobel-Prize-Wannabe beseeched the jeep with peaceful tidings; it spat oil in his face, though it was kind enough not to leave a stain on the yard. Trust-Fund-Rockboy wouldn’t go near the damn thing.
Neither would Vicky.
“Please, Vicky, reason with it!” Too-Smart-Too-Pretty begged her one morning over oatmeal and blueberries.
Vicky said one more time:
“It has nothing to do with me!”
But college kids know a lie when they hear one.
There was nothing Vicky wanted in that jeep. Nothing pure, nothing safe. She could smell pain a mile away, and that jeep reeked.
Vicky went to talk to the jeep on Friday.
She cleared her throat cordially. Next step would’ve been a handshake. Alas, this encounter required intimacy.
Lights hummed to life. The exhaust pipe coughed awake. Vicky stood firm; she knew her roommates were window-watching.
“Are you a ghost, jeep?”
What else could she say?
The voice that answered filled her bones like gold, or honey:
“No, I’m not a ghostjeep. But this was better than hitchhiking.”
The driver door opened and out stepped Nothing. Vicky swore she heard confident feet.
She’d never felt more at home, or afraid.
There was noise on the hood, an affectionate pat. The jeep purred like a giant domestic cat.
Vicky refused to believe she was seeing — or feeling — any of it.
She only wanted to return to watching stocks.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” her throat shook, “but it’s not me.”
“Oh, but it is,” the voice said, warm and welcoming.
Vicky wished it would go away.
“Only you can help me,” it said.
“I can’t. And even if I could — ”
SLAM! The jeep door severed her sentence. She heard Trust Fund Boy shriek inside the house.
“Listen,” the voice said in a stronger tone, “you may not have ended up in a ditch, but some of us did. We’re all connected.”
The voice was tampering with what Vicky valued most: her boundaries.
She felt her walls crumbling.
“I’m not what you think. I’m a Business Major. I’m a nobody.”
The ghost sighed. Vicky wondered how a ghost could sigh.
“Do you really think I’d drive all the way here if I didn’t know you’re the one?”
Few can deny truth when it stares them in the face.
“What do you need?” she asked, and she dreaded the answer.
Revenge? Blood? Where would this take her?
“Clothes.”
“Pardon me?”
“Clothes. It’s bad enough having an unmarked grave. The least I could get is clothing.”
“That’s it? You just want…clothing?”
“I’m not saying it’ll fix everything” — again the sigh, perfect for TV — “but it’s a start.”
Vicky ran back to the house, slamming the door in her hurry.
“Something blue would be nice!” the voice called after her.
“Oh my God, did it kill you?”
“Is it leaving?”
“Are you hurt?”
Vicky ignored her roommates’ concerns and headed to the basement, jumping three stairs at a time. She tore into Trust Fund Boy’s ironically immaculate closet. He pursued her downstairs (his was the only room in the basement) and not so eloquently told her what he thought about people barging in. She pushed past, his brown-leather-red-feather fedora in hand. Whatever whines he had, she was too fast to hear them, and swung to the upper flight of stairs that led to the other rooms.
“Are you okay?”
“What are you doing?”
Those chocolate-brown khaki pants, she decided, would be Nobel Prize’s donation; Too Smart’s cobalt top would fill out the pile.
She paused in her own room, not from indecision, but sentiment — a feeling far rarer than dreams.
In contrast to Trust Fund’s closet, Vicky’s was unabashedly haphazard. Under the stew of dog-eared textbooks and mismatched shoes sat a lonely cardboard box longing to be touched.
Vicky pulled out the brown leather bomber jacket her father once wore roaring down open highways, sleeves rumpled and worn with so many dangerous memories. Kisses. Concerts. Beers.
Car accidents.
She buried her face in the jacket and breathed for what seemed like a long, long time.
Then she ran outside.
Caitlin Hoffman writes and lives and makes music in Canada.
