Forgotten

We were coming home from a band clinic, and I was riding in the car with the band director’s wife and son. The son was a couple of years older than me, and he was driving. We were all sitting in the front seat of one of those big, 1950s cars. We stopped for church, and afterwards his mother asked to trade places with me. I moved to the middle of the front seat, and she moved to the right. That’s the last thing I remember.

When I “came to,” I was in the hospital treatment room, talking to my parents and doctor. I had already been X-rayed and had a few broken bones and nose dug into by windshield glass. I learned that the mother, sitting in what would have been my seat, had gone through the windshield, ripping off her face. Her son was pinned by the steering wheel in an accident I would never remember.

The ambulance crew found me walking in a field beside where the two cars had collided, the other car having gone through a yield sign. I was talking and seemed alert but my mind was still on a visit from the hell in that car.

The fear still remains. Since then, I’ve never been able to pass a car on a two-lane highway. Even when drivers behind me honk and scream. One time I followed a tractor for several miles, until it pulled over.

I had seen his mother’s raw face. It could have been me.

Pris Campbell
Lake Worth, Florida