Dancing on the Dashboard - A creepy story that may leave you scared of hula dancers ^_^

Chester Miller loved to experiment with GPS systems and inanimate objects. I should know this especially, even though I have been cast aside as a disappointment. Sitting at the bottom of a giveaway box, I decided to try out the car crash finder on my GPS.

“There is a crash in your area.” I crackled to life like an old-fashioned radio. Chester whipped his head around.

“What the heck? Thought this thing didn’t work” Chester muttered. He snatched me from the bottom of the box and flicked my grass skirt. Swaying back and forth, I spoke again.

“Car crash sighted in area.” I announced.

“Let’s see if there really is…” Chester snatched his car keys from a metal hook and scrambled out the door to the garage.

The leathery dashboard of his car grew warmer as we drove on and I danced.

“Car crash in area.”

“Great.” Chester grinned, probably imagining what a fortune I could make. A car decal and a GPS? Consumers love tacky yet useful antiques.

“Car crash in one mile.” I stated. Chester looked around, confused as to why there was no traffic created from the crash. He shrugged.

“Car crash in one thousand feet.”

“What? That’s not true.” Chester flicked my peachy face and made his way to the nearest exit.

“Car crash in two hundred feet...car crash in one hundred feet.” Chester angrily turned at the next exit.

“Car crash in ten feet.” Chester swiped me off the dashboard.

“Car crash in...one foot.”

I had always hoped to witness a car crash very much like my own death, and Chester Miller’s was not enough. It would take something bigger, a crash more like mine for me to understand my own death through the pain of others. No matter how many times I would attempt this, I had a feeling that I would fail. Perhaps the emergency vehicles could give me an idea.

Shannon Ainsley hated her job. Who wanted to clean up the sickly wreckage of a car crash on a dreary day?  As a kid she had always wanted to be a galant  firefighter, but perhaps it was the wrong career path to follow. The bodies always made her nauseous - if she were lucky enough to find them still intact.

“Passenger seats fully destroyed...steering wheel almost intact...body not found.” Shannon jotted down on her wooden clipboard. She was preparing to take samples when a flowery object caught her eye. I remained without a scratch, standing upright on the remains of a tire.

“Hey, Charles…” Shannon called to her supervisor.

“Yeah? What the-” Charles noticed the sole survivor of the crash- a single dashboard hula dancer.

“Put it in the truck. Maybe it’s good luck.”  He joked and went back to chatting with a fellow firefighter. Shannon shrugged and put me on the dashboard of the cranberry fire truck.

After calling a tow truck to get the rest of the crash, Shannon and her team steadily made their way down the road, back to the station. I danced on the fire truck’s dashboard and announced,

“Car crash sighted in area.” Shannon glanced over, alarmed. Charles chuckled.

“This little trinket can come in handy. Wonder why it didn’t burn.” Charles mused.

“Car crash in one mile.” Shannon ignored me and turned her walkie-talkie up.

“Car crash in one thousand feet.” Shannon glared at me, obviously thinking about dunking me into a trashcan.

“Crash in five hundred feet. Car crash in one hundred feet.” I added. Charles did a double take.

“This thing isn’t even accurate! We aren’t going that fast. How do you turn this thing off?” He tinkered with the bottom of my small plastic island.

“Car crash in ten feet. Crash in five feet.” I pushed on.

“Car crash sighted in one foot.”

Later in the day, reporters would fill local newspapers with the story of a fire truck’s explosive crash that killed anyone in the vicinity. Insiders would claim to have found an unburned dashboard hula dancer clutched in the bony hands of the unidentified person in the front passenger seat. Many others would compare this crash with a car explosion ten years ago, one I remember very, very well.                                          

After the many burnt cars had been cleaned up, amatuer ghost hunters came around with expensive equipment, searching for the spirits of the explosion. There was a big sign against a wooden fence surrounded by flowers, stating the victims’ names, and the ghost hunters beeped nearby. One of the teenagers helping with the search tripped over a plastic hula dancer hidden in the tall grass and assumed it was a rock.

They are said to have found signs of a poltergeist. They were correct. If they had come earlier I would have been happy to let them know where the next crash was.

But I had already left, satisfied that others will now feel the pain I did.