Page 14 of Prime Time Romance

All of this is highly familiar, but in a bizarre way. It’s like I’ve seen it all before, but I also swear on my life I’ve never been here.

Have I had this dream before?

I lift the keys from the hook and exit out the kitchen door to a small dirt pathway that connects to the blue cottage next door and leads out to the main road. Sitting in front of a small yellow one-car garage is a bright-red Mini Cooper, which chirps as I click the unlock button.

Although I’m aware that I’m possibly committing my second felony of the morning, I get into the driver’s seat and start the car, rationalizing that if I’m not dreaming, then I’ve most likely been kidnapped, and the police will probably understand.

Backing out of the driveway, I instinctively turn right past another large patch of beach grass onto a paved road.

There’s an outcrop of buildings in the distance that flank both sides of the road. It looks like the main street of a small town.

The closer I get to the buildings, the more uneasiness grows in my belly. Like the cottage, it all seems too familiar.

The cobblestone-lined sidewalks are littered with wooden flower boxes filled with bright purple and blue pansies, interspaced with welcoming stone benches gently shaded by tall red maples whose leaves are still a bright Kelly green.

At least my imagination is cute and quaint.

I creep slowly past the tiny shops. There’s a dry cleaner, a pharmacy, and a barbershop with one of those red-and-blue swirling poles, but it’s the bakery with its fluffy white cakes in the window that catches my eye.

Particularly the cake covered in bright-colored sprinkles with the single white birthday candle in its center.

I hit the brakes.

It’s rather fortuitous because there are two men crossing the road ahead of me, carrying a ladder between them. They’re followed by a woman whose bright-red hair is so familiar that I roll down my window and crane my neck to get a better look. I can’t see her face. She’s too busy yelling at the men as they lean the ladder against one of the lampposts. Instead, I watch as one man climbs and the other runs back across the street, returning a moment later with the end of a banner that is tied to an opposite lamppost. I stare as the banner pulls taut and the words 75th Annual Ms. Lobsterfest Pageant—June 21 7:00 p.m. are displayed in sparkly red paint.

Ms. Lobsterfest?

“No forking way.”

All of a sudden, it all comes together. Like one of those 3D puzzles, the answer suddenly pops right out, as if it were right there in front of me all along.

I’m not in a dream at all.

My foot finds the gas. I’m sweating. A panicked feeling is climbing the walls of my throat.

It’s not possible. It makes no logical sense.

I’m so preoccupied with my own panic that I don’t see the guy as he steps off the sidewalk until it’s too late.

My foot finds the brake pedal, but not before the Mini makes contact, and he crumples to the street below with an audible thwack.

5

Josh

“Josh?

“Joshua?

“Joshua Brian Adam James…I don’t actually know your middle name. But that’s not really important right now. You have to wake up.”

I crack one eye open, then the other. The outline of the wild-haired woman looming above me brings a needed rush of relief.

I did it.

I finally woke up.

That was possibly the weirdest and most vivid dream I’ve ever had. For a little while there, I was starting to worry it was something else entirely.