Junkyard Adventure

Need therapy?

Walk past the high junk-yard fence. She's staring at you, still gray and sleek, still friendly. Still looking just like home. You don't notice that the backseat isn't straight, don't see the way she's bent and jammed. From the front she still looks pretty. Tell her so. Say, "Darlin', you still look pretty." It's okay for your voice to crack. Who cares if the paramedic told you not to cry? If you were to do it again, you would cry as much as you wanted.

Talk to the tiny, goblin-like man who hides behind the grate. He'll tell you as the owner of the car, THE car, your only car, you're the only one who can go into the junkyard. You look small. Your mother and the burly man with you say they'll be on the other side of the high fence, the one topped with three strands of barbed wire. The gate is wide open. Anyone could have come in and touched her pretty, silver paint, stolen the hard candies that, in the darkness after the crash, you left under the seats. Your team laugh and smile like it's a joke. You're not alone. You've got back-up. They hand you the screwdrivers, and walk off. Give the little man your papers through the barred window of the fortified hut. Wait while he photocopies them, alone.

Perhaps it's better that you do this alone.

The charred and crumpled shells of cars are so close together, you can hardly open the door of yours. So many of the cars are blackened and blistered. Your crash wasn't so bad. She's still silver. You feel a little surge of pride because, compared to everything else in this lot, in this cemetary of wheels and dreams, she is still a tank. That's why you're still here.

Her license plate- YOUR license plate- is curled under from where the girl hit you so hard that even your tank curled its tail underneath. There are scratches on her spare tire cover. You get down on the ground, examine the one screw holding on your plate, fumble with the screwdrivers too big for your hands. You lean on the ground to leverage yourself down, and pain bites. There's blood; scratches and slices over your palm. Blue-green glass litters the ground, like a snowfall of sapphires. You kneel, hoping your knees and feet won't follow your hands. You wore sandals here. That's what a noob you are.

With your bleeding hands, you unscrew your scratched, bent, shredded license plate, and as you stare at it, there is this little piece of victory, the first piece since the crash seemed to take everything you had. They can take your beautiful car. They can slam into you and make everything hurt. They can force you to stay on the empty road for three hours and speak to bored cop after foul-mouthed cop and tell you not to cry, but this piece of shredding metal? This is yours, because you took this back. It will go on your next space ship, on your next, glorious vehicle that you will keep running against the odds, and they can't take it from you. It's readable.

You use your key- you rescued this, that night, remember? You were a little bit a hero- you fished it from the fabric surrounding your spare tire- you use your key and pry her open. You manage not to dent the green car beside you. That is someone else's baby car. Someone else loves her, and will come for her corpse.

It's okay to tell her she's been a good girl. You know cars don't have souls, that she isn't alive, but your heart doesn't believe it.

Pull every piece of your life from her wreckage.

Rob the peppermints from where they were rocketed under the seats, pull out each trivia card from beneath the carpeting, from where the wreck shoved them into the window-rims. Scavenge your rainy-day ketchup packets from the glove box, and rip up the seats so you can stick that one dime in your pocket. Pull out the radio- it feels like you're cutting out her heart- pull out the radio, and figure out (you've never seen this before) how to disconnect the wires. The last one, you have to break. You're strong enough. When you have every dime and peppermint, every ketchup packet, that crummy blue pen and the one, forgotten silver fork, when there isn't a scrap of homework left and the radio, trailing it's limp heart-strings, is stuffed in your bag with your scavenged license plate, climb over the rocked and crooked seats, and pick up the jack.

Lift it over the fence, and hand it through the barbed wire.

As you walk away, carrying your wiring and your ketchup packets and even the cigarette lighter, because hey, why not keep your cigarette lighter, for a little while you don't feel like a victim trapped on a highway, like a person whose back still aches from the impact of a single thoughtless act that crushed a world and whose key-chain has lost the best key. You feel like a sci-fi heroine who can walk into a junkyard and rip out her own ship's heart.

Everything might still suck, but hey. You're not totally helpless.

You have a license plate.