A Fragment Of Everyone Alive

A woman is crossing the street. She turns her head and sees a Tesla speeding toward her. She doesn't move. She's not afraid. She's just frozen, unable to believe what is about to happen. She stares at the Tesla, hoping the driver will sense her, but the driver, a man who works remotely from home trading crypto and who goes out every day at lunchtime to buy a matcha and stare at the young women who frequent an all-pink coffee shop, is not looking at the road; he's looking down at his device, watching a clip of two men fistfighting over a parking space. He's laughing as he drives eighty-five miles per hour through a school zone, heading straight for the woman. This is how he always drives down this street, ignoring stop signs, because why? Because he's a free man in a free country. The world belongs to him. Get out of the way if you don't want to get hit. The distance between the woman and the car is negligible, and she can't decide if the Tesla is going to hit her because it wants to or because it's indifferent to her presence. She doesn't change her expression or scream or wave her hands. It's pointless. The only thing to do is nothing. The Tesla hits her legs first, crushing them, sending them backward as she flies forward into the windshield and bounces into the air. She's doing cartwheels. She continues to stare straight ahead. As she heads down toward the ground, she sees that nothing has changed in the world she is about to leave forever. The kids are still playing on the school field. The landscapers are still installing sod on the front lawn of a two-story Spanish villa that has taken the better part of two years to build. And she still has lupus, the disease she was diagnosed with as a teenager and was told would eventually kill her. Now, with the help of an electric vehicle, it will never get the chance. It will die with the cessation of her sensations. She hits the ground on her side, her head and hips taking the brunt of the force—lights out, the end of the woman's story. The Tesla keeps going down the street, the owner either unaware or too busy to stop and see the damage his car has done to a stranger who had the temerity to cross the street without giving his car the right of way. When the Tesla's owner and the LAPD figure out what he has done, he will tell himself and the authorities that Los Angeles is a city for cars, not people. He will shrug and say, "Hey, what do you want me to do? Accidents happen all the time." The LAPD will agree with the man and accept a large donation in crypto to make the entire situation disappear, much to the intolerable frustration of the woman's family — her husband and two teenage daughters. At the woman's funeral, her sister will eulogize her, and most of what she says will be forgotten by those in attendance except for this: “Her life was made up of the short distance between the first intimations of catastrophe and the catastrophe itself.”