(no subject)

[gaskin]

I saw you in a stretcher off to the side of the highway. Paramedics catered carefully to your vital needs while a neckbrace held your face toward the sky. I wondered whether you were conscious and what thoughts would be crossing your mind as you stared up into the tri-colored evening of early June. Traffic narrowed to a single lane to avoid your car stretched across two lanes on its roof. Each person drove past at idling speed; half for caution but mainly to fulfill morbid curiosities of death and tragedy. They all resumed to driving 80 not even one hundred feet later. In your sudden misfortune you became a spectacle to hundreds of cars. They held you before their eyes, peering through glass(es) to see a nameless/faceless glimpse of disaster that could have been their own.

I just want you to know that in those few seconds in passing, I saw your face.