glass
Glass on the road.
It's just glass. Lying there, broken shards from broken windows. Lying in the grass.
Green and glitter.
You know what happened. In two words, in just two words, what happened can be summed up.
Pity you can't say them without your voice trailing off.
Car... car crash...
There, you've said it. Already coming to grips with the scene.
But what can't be said... is everything else.
Who?
A family. A family of four and their friend, coming back home from a weekend at the beach. The two men rode in the front of the land rover, talking and joking with one another. They were friends since college. Behind them sat a woman, a pretty woman, wife and mother. Barely thirty. She was laughing at a joke her husband cracked before reaching out to rest her delicate hand on his shoulder, lovingly gazing at him from her seat behind him.
Next to her, on either side. Two children. A boy and a girl. The girl was holding her dolly, the boy playing a video game. He was eight; she was five. They fought, like all kids, but loved each other.
What?
A weak tire. Maybe it was worn out from overuse, maybe it was faulty from the factory. Maybe it was just meant that it would burst and send the vehicle out of control, causing the driver to swerve wildly to fight and keep on the road and not fall into the ditch on the side, forcing him to careen into the opposite lane and right into the path of an oncoming trailer that couldn't stop in time and plowed into the out-of-control van...
You don't even have to ask as you see the hulk that was once a vehicle, a mode of transport. It's smashed, crushed, just... gone. There's no way someone could have survived that.
You stare it with morbid curiosity and awe, stare at it. Wonder what exactly they were doing, wonder what they were thinking, saying when they died. You can only wonder, though, because you'll never know.
Something in the grass and glass catches your eye. Something colorful, something that stands out. You look at it, squinting before you see it clearly and turn away, your curiosity gone. The only thing is that feeling in the pit of your stomach, that feeling that tells you that you want to throw up but you won't, that feeling that is just so goddamn awful that you think you're going to cry, just by thinking about it.
Lying there, in the middle of the green and the glitter, you saw a doll. Her smiling face upturned to the sky... and her arm ripped off.
You don't even need to know.