This is the black VW convertible bug my mom got right before we moved to Houston. It was not the greatest car. Every time it was turned on the smell of gasoline would flow out from the air vents and the rumbling of the engine would bounce you. We drove this car from Houston to LA and back again every summer for at least three years. It always broke down somewhere on 10 in the midst of the desert, and we’d have to wait for some stranger or the highway patrol to pull over and help us out. We carried one of those huge Rand McNally United States road atlases with us and I’d endlessly count the little red numbers from arrow to arrow to calculate the miles remaining between each town. My mom liked to stop at every side shop and follow the roads least traveled and I’d say, “Please, Mom, let’s just stick to the highway and not get lost.” One time, we were going along 10, windows rolled down, hot air rushing in, on our way to LA. Two lanes West, two lanes East, and then the wide dry dirt median between the two directions. The radio wasn’t tuning into anything, so we just had the sounds of the road and the wind and the heat. A fly was swept into the car and got trapped in the air between us, circling and dipping and rising, and I tried to catch it–it wasn’t exactly fast, but I couldn’t. My mom said, “Look, here, this is how you do it,” and went after the fly, and there we both were, hurtling down a desert highway in the noon day sun trying to catch a fly in the middle of our car. We looked up when we heard a truck blow its horn. We had crossed over the median and were heading straight for an 18 wheeler. Mom yanked the car over into the median, put on the brakes which spun us quickly around a multiple of times and we came to a stop with dust rising all around us, unable to see anything, both of us completely still. My mom’s hands were gripping the wheel and my right hand was on the door and my other was on the dashboard. I jumped out of the car and said, “Are we okay?” Which my mother found hilarious. The fly was gone. We were alive. We got back on the road, laughing all the way to LA. When we got there, everyone we saw, we tried to tell them this story about how we almost died trying to get a stupid fucking fly out of our car. But we could never get very far in the story because we’d be wiping our tears and laughing too much.