​I’m talking to a friend on the phone about the family coming down to Southern California for a visit. She says, “We’re coming! I just bought the tickets. We’re taking Trailer.”

“Trailer?”
 
And then boom, I’m at the Trailer Corporate Headquarters and R&D facility inside a hangar, where a swarthy executive is giving me the tour. A 747 idles before us, and behind it the team is busy hitching it up. It is large and triangular, and its hatch is open like the upper jaw of a crocodile’s mouth. Inside, the passengers are laying down flat into form-fitting spaces, like an egg carton for people. They’re all wearing flying suits, but the executive assures me this is only for testing purposes. “Go ahead and imagine regular people wearing hoodies and jeans if it makes it easier for you,” he tells me. I look at him strange.
 
“No flight attendants, no drink service, no restrooms,” the executive explains. “It’s intrinsic to the design that passengers remain flat, but it’s also how we offer such competitively priced flights.” He shoots his finger at a man uselessly motioning with those lighted batons people wave on the runway. “Alright, Donger,” he shouts. Donger? “Let ‘er rip.”
 
The 747 revs its engines and lurches forward, dragging the trailer behind it. The hatch has been closed and I can see the faces of the passengers pressed beneath the glass, which is fogging up.
 
“You’re going to want to step back,” the executive says, smiling as the airplane guns it past us, reaching takeoff speed with a quickness only possible in dreams. We watch the plane lift and take with it a trailer full of two hundred discount flyers. As it climbs, I watch the trailer sway back and forth from its hitch.
 
“That was actually pretty smooth,” I say to the executive. I turn to him. “What’s the landing like?”
 
Suddenly he’s not the executive but a greasy mechanic wiping his hands. “The landing’s not so smooth,” he squints. “The trailer hits first.”

​I am submerged in a bean box. Black-eyed peas, I think. The sun has warmed the beans, making it all the more luxurious. I hear someone yelling, “Mommy!” in the distance, so I sink beneath the surface to hide from my children. Even in the dream I'm reminded of that Calgon commercial that I thought was so hilarious when I was young. Now I get it. Like, completely. Which is why I’m burrowing down beneath the peas as the squealing voices of my offspring approach. And there beneath the beans I find forgotten trinkets of my youth:

• Red Cash Box with a single digit security code on a dial of ten numbers.
• My first sticker book, which was really a photo album with a picture on the cover of a couple walking along a riverbank and the man is smoking.
• My old white leather Nikes with the red whoosh and a tribal amount of friendship pins clattering from my shoelaces.
• A pair of clamdiggers my mother sewed for my brother in a garish textile, making him the subject of endless ridicule at school day he wore them. 

I jump out of the bean box quickly. There could be anything in there.