Like Mother, Like Son

I gaze out the window as the streetlights and dark trees blur past us. The cold night air pricks my face, making me shiver. My eyelids drop down farther.

"How long until were home, Momma?", I look up at the bright white moon and sigh as Darien snores lightly beside me. She looks at me through the mirror, hands on the wheel.

"We'll be home soon honey, I promise", she assured me, "Thankfully the road's clear tonight". I look through the side mirror and glance at the backside of the car. She's right, the road really is clear tonight. I wait a couple of minutes and peer through the mirror again. I haven't seen a single car pass by us in over half an hour. I slump back in my seat and rub my hand over my face. I might as well go to sleep if were going to be on the road for a while. I allow my eyes to drop lower. Lower. Lower until there's nothing but black to see. My breathing begins to slow.

Silence fills the car as the soothing sound of wheels rolling over concrete plays. The wind howls a low tune which gently sways the leaves of the trees. The head lights brighten the road as the car speeds ahead. Suddenly a large bang hits the car. The impact sends my brother and I jolting forward against the seat belt. We look at Mom. Her hands are gripped tightly on the wheel, but her eyes are somewhere else. I unbuckle and climb up next to her.

"What was that?", I glance at the still object lying underneath the now dented hood of the car. She pushes me away from the window and urgently steps out of the car.

"Stay in the car", she tells me as she moves to the front of the car and peers down at the object. Her face turns to shock. I slowly move towards the window and Darien does the same. I gasp. It wasn't an object that was under the car, it was a person, still as the air. They weren't moving. Their chest was still, not going up and down like a regular person's should be. The lights revealed their face contorted in shock, eyes wide, mouth open and oozing with blood. Blood, lot's of it.

I put my hand over my mouth as a wave of nausea hits me. She shakes the broken body. They lay still, her face changes into fear. She opens the car door and climbs inside. "Sit in your seats, now!", she yells and puts her key into the ignition. We buckle up and look at one another.

I gulp, "Mom, what was that on the road?". She glares at me through the mirror but says nothing, she begins to drive again. The cold wind blows into the car feeling chiller than it had earlier. "Mom", I start again, "did you hear me-".

She yells at me to shut up, " I heard you, Aiden. And it was just a branch that fell from a tree as we drove by. Nothing to worry about." I watch her as she drives. Was it really a branch that we hit? I sighed, it had looked so much like a person.

I laid down on my seat and stared out the window. I probably just saw something that resembled a human body. I knew Mom would never lie to me. She never would. I knew that I could trust her.

"Kids just keep this between me and you okay?", she says as she speeds off into the night. But no matter how hard I try to believe her words, something in the back of my mind tells me somethings wrong.