drive car

The scents and sounds triggered a mental avalanche of memories and I shivered at the intensity of it. I almost didn’t notice the car that pulled up to the curb beside me.
It was an ancient hearse, a Caddy that must have been built sometime in the years immediately following World War II, complete with rounded tail fins. It had been painted dark, dark blue, and given a flame job in shades of electric purple. It wavered and bobbed drunkenly down the avenue, turned a bit too sharply toward the curb, lurched ahead with a roar of the engine, and then skidded to a halt with the brakes locked, missing the posts along the edge of the road, and the chains that hung between them, by maybe an inch.
“Will there be anything else, Sir Knight?” Cat Sith asked.
“Not right now,” I said warily. “Um. Who is driving that thing?”
“I recommend it be you,” Sith said with unmistakable contempt, and then with a swish of his tail, he vanished.
The engine roared once more, and the car lurched but didn’t move from its rest. The lights went on and then off, and then the wipers swept on a few times before the engine dropped to an idle and the brake lights shut off.
I approached the car warily, leaned across the chains, and rapped on the driver’s-side window.
Nothing happened. The windows were tinted a little, enough to make the dark interior invisible on the well-lit street. I couldn’t see anyone inside. I opened the door.
“Three cheers, boys!” piped a tiny cartoon-character voice. “Hip, hip!”
“Hip!” shrilled maybe a dozen more tiny voices.
“Hip, hip!”
“Hip!”
“Hip, hip!”
“Hip!” That was followed by a heartfelt chorus of “Yay!”
Sitting in the driver’s seat of the hearse were a dozen tiny humanoids. Their leader, the largest of them, was maybe eighteen inches tall. He looked like an extremely athletic youth, drawn down to scale. He was dressed in armor made from castoff bits of garbage and refuse. His breastplate had been made from a section of aluminum can, a white one bearing a Coca-Cola logo. The shield on his left arm was made from the same material, this one sporting Coke’s seasonal Christmas polar bears. Part of a plastic toothpaste travel container had been fixed to his belt, and what looked like a serrated butter knife was thrust into it, its handle wrapped in layers of duct tape and string. His hair was violet, a few shades of blue darker than the lavender I remembered, silky, and nearly weightless, drifting around his head like dandelion down. Wings like a dragonfly’s hung from his back like an iridescent cloak.
He was standing atop a formation of smaller sprites stacked up in a miniature human pyramid, and his hands rested on the wheel. Several weary-looking little wee folk were leaning against the gearshift, and several more were on the floor, holding the brake down in a dog pile of tiny bodies. They were all dressed in similar outfits of repurposed garbage.
The leader gave me a sharp salute, beaming. “Major General Toot-toot of the Sir Za Winter Lord Knight’s Guard reporting for duty! It is good to see you, my lord!” His wings buzzed and he fluttered out of the hearse to hover in front of my face, spinning in circles. “Look, look! I got new gear!”


Cold Days Chapter 9, Page 75-77