on the road

A screech. A crash. Impatient horns from outside. People waiting to go home. There was no glancing out of windows. They just hammered their horns from inside, pressing impatiently, pressing many times. The smell of diesel hung low and heavy. The thick fog pressing in from all sides, pushing out visibility. The mirrors on cars were fogged up.

A screech. A crash. Inside the car that had forcefully come to a halt sat a man. He had pulled the emergency brake. The other car it seemed had come out of nowhere. He had not seen it in this fog. To be fair to him, it was just idling in the middle of the road, somewhat like what he was doing right now. He had been going at a moderate speed, not too slow, not too fast.

A man sat inside his car, having forcefully pulled the brake at the last minute. He could not have swerved out of the lane, and into another one, on his right was a wall, this had been the fast lane - now it was clogged. And on his left had been cars, the steady procession, like so many ants in a hive, still going strong.

The man sat a little dazed. He had just bumped his head on the steering wheel. He was a little dizzy. He had thought he was invincible. Accidents happened to other people. Not to him. In this country everyone thought they were invincible. It was how you convinced yourself that the traffic was normal. How you remained sane. Narrowly avoiding the hungry grip of death on a daily basis, swerving in and out and away. Sometimes there would be cars coming from the wrong direction in the wrong lane. Sometimes there would be trucks. Proper eighteen wheeler trucks. Motorcycles habitually held whole families, a father, a mother, three kids. You made do with whatever you had. And in this country, traffic was a convoluted mess with barely the thinnest veneer of rules and order. It was everyone out for themselves. You made do with what you had. He had not thought accidents would happen to him. He should not be dazed, he thought. But he had hit his head on the steering wheel, and the impact had not been light. His foot was still on the brake, one of his hands still on the handle of the emergency brake, another was feeling his head, but mostly on the steering wheel. His head throbbed a little. Outside the horns were loud and impatient. Insistent. This was expected. Everyone expected something like this. Did not mean they had to like it. So they honked loudly. Angrily.

The stench of diesel was strong and heavy. The taste of fumes, of smog was throat wracking. The fog was thick, you almost had to push through it, not unlike fighting a strong wind.

The man sat a little dazed. His mind was not working properly. He was in shock. His systems were screaming red alert, but he did not process that properly. He was starting to feel cold. His forehead had turned blue, and soon from it would begin to blossom an intricate design of blood, a whole Rorshach image on his forehead. Soon, he would pass into a coma. He would not wake up. The stench of death and diesel and smog would remain in his car.