In Your Dreams

You Had One Job

The decade old Nissan above me had guts eroded tight with the greasy rust of a millennia driving on salted roads. Everyone in the shop knew just by hearing that the thing needed new bearings on both of its front wheels, but getting the damn parts off to get to that point was going to be a pain.

Thus they had sent me, the grunt, to start scrubbing.

Streams of rust, grease, WD-40, and cleaner dribbled onto my safety googles and dampened the white mask I wore, but I was more worried about my arms falling off from the strain than being poisoned by grease air.

After a half hour of gross, drippy torture, I gave up.

"Try her now, Jim!" I shouted out, too sore and tired to even roll myself out from under it.

"You gonna come out first?"

"Nah. I'm getting some zen time with this girl's neither regions. Don't kill me, yeah?"

"I doubt anything's gonna come flying, but best to be safe."

"Alright, alright." I dug my heels in and rolled out from the front. God bless rolly mechanics benches.

At the sight of me, Jim, a graying man with gristle from his scalp to his toes, whistled.

"Well ain't you a right mess."

"That's what happens when you try to scrub somewhere no one's cleaned since they bought the poor thing." I slipped my goggles to my forehead and blinked hard to adjust to the new light. The filth had created a sort of film that could have been used for UV protection.

I let my arms hang like pieces of meat that had nothing to do with me while I watched Jim set the impact wrench to the bolts and let loose. The motor of the wrench squealed, but those sticky suckers gave way and we had ourselves the bare innards of the wheel bearings.

Jim plucked out a few of the tiny steel balls from the fractured case and rubbed them between his greasy forefinger and thumb before handing them out to me.

"Check these little suckers out. Only half of them made it."

I accepted the little steel balls, and the car grease along with them. "Dang. No wonder it was making all that noise."

"Hopefully there's no damage to the wheel shaft because of it." He yanked a few more out. "Whale of a job, that one."

Whales made me think of the gray city of my dreams, where the bank had shown out gold and brown. I had never met the girl inside who had been ready to ensnare Basil, but I knew Mary. Mary, the second of my special ed teachers and beautiful to boot. Her patience and kindness made her more than worthy for Basil...

"I've been having these weird repetitive dreams lately," I said, keeping my hands out to accept more of the ball bearings. "Can I keep these?" They felt like super-heavy marbles and were fun to roll around my palm.

"Don't see why not. My wife would say there's something major in your life or subconscious that needs seeing to. What kinds of things you keep seeing? I'll pass them along to her."

Jim's wife wasn't a therapist or psychologist, by any means. But she did get part of a degree in psychology and was a nut for dream translations and how they reflected on the subconscious. Thus, why I had mentioned it to Jim.

"A lot of driving. It's like a big road trip. But there's always this same guy with me."

"Ooo, what kind of guy?" The wheel shaft gave a loud crunch. "Am I going to be privy to the nitty sticky teenage details?"