[Creative Nonfiction] Mustang
Read the winning entry for our week of December 8, 2024 prompt, Finite Time, chosen by guest judge Oliver Burkeman
Mustang
by Kat LeRoy
When I was sixteen, my Grandpa Mike gave me his 1975 Ford Mustang. It was already almost ten years old, chocolate-brown, with an automatic transmission and a barely used AM/FM radio. Although it was a hand-me-down, I still consider it an inheritance because within a few weeks of passing my driver’s test and taking the car home, my Grandpa was in a hospital after suffering a massive stroke.
What I remember most about the car, besides its exhilarating promise of freedom, was its protective weight. It was a solid vehicle, its steel foundation grounded to asphalt as if by monorail. Lines like a shark’s fin, delicate but muscular. I knew very little and cared even less about cars, but this one I loved.
Turning to dust in a white room, under the smell of cough drops, the nurses talking to you as if you were a plural of small boys, hands without fingerprints, sandpapered shape.
It was the summer of 1982. I had not only passed my driver’s test, but I had my own set of wheels which was no small feat in my inner city high school. Suddenly I had a posse of girlfriends with less generous grandparents or draconian mothers, eager to hit the Santa Monica beaches, a grueling three hour trip by public bus. I was their ride. They’d pile in, I’d turn the key, and minutes later we’d be flying south down the 405 toward Pacific Coast Highway.
Exactly one year later, the summer before my senior year in high school, I still had the same car. But I was a year older, and it was a much different summer from the one before. The car afforded me and my friends access to more than just daytime sand and surf. We’d been going to dance clubs every night, suntanned and looking for attention from boys more sharply dressed and smooth tongued than the wanna-be ska-boys and punk rockers in our neighborhood.
My bedroom was in the back of the house so even after midnight, I could sneak in without waking anyone and tiptoe straight to bed. But on this particular night, when I let myself in through the backdoor, I walked straight into the kitchen and into the living room. For some unknown reason I felt scared, untethered. As a child, when my bedroom was off the hallway that connected to my mom’s room, I could run, panic-stricken after a nightmare, burst open my mom’s door and climb into bed with her. I had the same impulse that night but instead curled up on the living room couch.
Because the last time I saw you, you were speaking in tongues. Laid out on a white cot in a colorless room, fever song of cobblestones and white cake, thimbles of vodka on a silver tray. Those voices that passed through you and swam in the damp room like coils of smoke.
Sometime about 3am, the phone woke me up. I heard my mom let out a small cry from her bedroom and I knew he was gone. We had been to visit him a few days before in the rehab center, my brother and I watching the green lights that danced on a screen above his head. He had never completely gained consciousness since the stroke the year before.
A few weeks later, after the blurred arrangements and the funeral service and the obligatory condolences, I decided to trade the car in. I wanted something far from the steadfast, rock-like Mustang I’d driven the last year. I wanted the giddy and juvenile. A found a canary-yellow Kaarmanghia with no back seat and a Blaupunkt stereo, the car I drove to my high school graduation and then back and forth through my four years of college, a two hour drive north from my childhood home. And for a long time, I forgot about the Mustang.
But sometimes I remembered you, in a photograph, holding me as a newborn, days old, pink and wrinkled and you already an old man, pressing me against your chest. Your startled smile containing the exact amount of time actually left.
A Note From Our Guest Judge,
I found these reflections on finite time poignant and stirring without exception, so they presented me with my own uncomfortable confrontation with limitation: being obliged to choose one winner from multiple deserving entries. I chose for first place a meditation on youth, death, and memory that brought into focus for me the strangeness of what it is to be a human, alive in the river of time, and the last line of which gave me goosebumps. I also wanted to mention the extraordinary power of the use of the second-person perspective in the entry I ranked second. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read these.
About Kat LeRoy
I recently relocated from California to Portugal and the move has allowed me more time to devote to my writing. I've been exploring other genres such as personal narrative and prose poetry, and just completed a family biography about my maternal grandmother.
I completed an MFA in Poetry at San Francisco State University and have spent the last two decades teaching literature and writing both in the Bay Area and abroad in Southeast Asia as well as coaching university faculty and students.
This piece was written in response to the prompt Finite Time.