Here is one I rarely talk about.
Many years ago. I was about 14 at the time.
It was the tail end of the days we would travel the powwow trail in the summers. Most of the people I knew was getting out of it. Even in the 90's there were signs of a depression coming because the specialty tourist markets like Powwows were beginning to dry out and a lot of people were soon unable to make money.
By the time I was 14 my parents only went to a couple a year, mostly to sell a few of my mothers soups and baskets and my step father's leather work to the fellow travelers. We had decided to go to a later in the summer get together at a friends house on the way home. Many other people from the trail decided to stop there and camp out in their yard. It's sort of a common practice since by the end of the season, if you didn't make money, you couldn't afford a hotel room.
Our friends threw a big BBQ, opened their homes to everyone set up canopies, and we had a wonderful weekend. I remember it clearly, the smell of flowers were thick in the air, it was hot and humid and the locusts were making a racket. One of the groups that were camping there was a drum team so they drug out their drum, and we spent the evening listening to them play, singing along to songs we knew, and dancing.
It was a small back woods area with a few houses clustered together and each house had several hundred acres behind it. the kids of each house new each other well so they crossed back and forth along the road some to ride the horses in one pasture some to get drinks at a friends house, some to go back to listen to the drum and or to run home to get pieces of regalia and join in on the dancing.
in the front of our friend's yard facing their drive is a line of bushes. to the right form where we stood was the "main" road. if you could call it that.
As dusk hit heavy and the bonfires lit the road , one of the nearby residents who lived a few miles down the road and came by to join in on the fun loaded her two kids into the car and said her good night.
she pulled out and her car disappeared behind the bushes and started home. I remembered standing, barefoot in the yard, with a soda in my hand, talking to someone when flying up along the main road, going over 90 mph this car speeds past then out of sight where the bushes block the view.
being my sarcastic self as a teenager I start to say " oh yeah I'm impressed, Idiot" but I didn't finish my sentence when I hear a huge POW! and then children start screaming. They begin appearing out of the brush and running into the yard I am standing in.
My first thought is "Oh my god they hit one of the children!"
I don't remember dropping the drink, I don't even remember making it to the scene. But I remember seeing our friend's car, we'll call her Peggy. Peggy's car, on the driver's side was folded in. The speeding car had hit her and was going so fast their car skidded almost a quarter of a mile before coming to a stop.
The driver and passenger of the speeding car were two teenagers that had been drinking. Neither were wearing their seatbelts. It was a miracle they both survived without permanent injury.
I ran up to the car with everyone else. Her 12 year old son got out wailing. he only had a small cut on his head. but her daughter, 4 years old in the back seat was very quiet and very pale. her big beautiful blue eyes turned up at me. there was another child with her, he had the most beautiful blond hair and these eyes, i don't remember irises, i just remember these deep huge pupils, that seemed to go on for eternity like huge voids. and he was right beside her, and she was so calm. so was he. it didn't strike me funny at first but he didn't have a seat belt, he didn't have any glass on him, there wasn't a hair out of place. he just looks at me as he sat by her. I assumed Peggy was just giving a neighborhood child a ride home as she often does.
someone pulled her out and handed her to me and I carried her away.
She never cried. she was so calm. She knew she was ok. When the ambulance arrived the paramedics checked her out. She didn't have a scratch or a bruise on her.
We sat there for three hours before someone came to take her home. Her mom and brother were taken to the hospital but strangely enough, even though both cars were completely destroyed everyone had only minor injuries.
I kept asking "what about the other little boy? is he ok?" and everyone kept saying "what little boy? who are you talking about?"
Later on I talked to Peggy and she said "Kristen, there was no other little boy. You were the only one who saw him.