Crash
My car sat in the muddy snow 50 yards away from the road I’d been traveling on. 50 yards from where it should have been.
Are you hurt? Asked the policeman.
No. I’m good.
He scanned my stuck vehicle with his maglight. He told me a story.
Not too long ago a milk truck tipped over in this same spot. Milk got everywhere. They had to fill it in with dirt. This is all milk we are standing on.
So my car is stuck in a milk swamp?
Yeah basically. But look on the bright side. You didn’t hit anything, your car looks okay, and no one was hurt. You just have to swallow your pride and deal with it.
That shouldn’t be hard.
He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road