Lost and Found: Anatomy of an Accident
I stood over the pile of shattered safety glass that had been swept against the median. It looked different in the daylight. I could still see the lights reflecting on the faces of the crowd that had gathered: red, orange, white, blue, red, orange, white, blue, red, orange…
The accident had obviously been terrible: the car was on its side and a swarm of black clad firemen were prying and pulling at the shell with their Jaws of Life. It was then that I noticed that there wasn’t another car. As if reading my mind, or noting the way I was looking around, the man next to me muttered, “there was only the one car… and the pedestrian.” That’s when I saw the paramedics attending to the body that lay in the street. It was almost 25 feet from where the car sat in the intersection. I was aghast – and yet I continued to stand there, transfixed by the horror (or spectacle) of it all. My friend, who stood behind me, had grown increasingly agitated.
“Why are they all standing around? Why are they filming? Taking pictures? Laughing?”
I found myself looking in his direction and saying something about human nature. Our dark heart. Everyone love’s a trainwreck.
As I shuffled the pile with the tip of my boot, I reached down and collected the items in the image above. Looking around I realized that they were the only physical remnants of what had happened at that intersection the night before. They struck me more powerfully than any photo from the scene could have: they were there, in my hand and not on a screen.
click the above image to enlarge
One Response to “Lost and Found: Anatomy of an Accident”
ewww.
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