At the three-way where Hinkston Pike and Maysville Road intersected I felt the effect of metal crushing a human body as if it were a can being recycled. I heard the panicked horn and I kept going. I saw the flamboyantly bright school bus and I kept going. I wanted to be home and I wanted to eat, that was all. In the split second before death, a person is said to recall all of their memories. I can safely say in these last few moments of life I’m just thinking of the endless hassle of dying. All of those papers my father has to fill out and the funeral planning, a bunch of responsibilities that I left them with. Where am I getting buried anyway? Who decides that?

Moments after a wreck there’s always the one hero of the day, the brave and fearless bystander. My hero’s comic wasn’t going to be a happy ending this time. He took the persona of just a coming-off-work Arby’s employee. The last thing I had to see shouldn’t be food and it certainly shouldn’t be good-mood food. When I saw him at my passenger side window I expected him to attempt to pull me out, but instead he just formed an awkwardly disappointed expression of defeat and began to call 911. The comic began to end faster. I looked at my stomach and saw that the metal had simply ripped me open from the side and through the front in a scene reminiscent of a c-section; I was giving birth to my own funeral. Hilarious.

Blood-loss induced a natural high that no drug on Earth can match. As the red began to pour from the newly found headwaters at the base of my body I began to irradiate heat. I was always a fan of cold weather, but I was disappointed to find that the preferred climate of passing-on happened to be hot. In an attempt to keep my eyes open I started to try to focus on objects outside of my car, but the only part of my car I could look out of without seeing a bus was the passenger side and all I could see was the Arby employee’s face moving a mouth at me; he looked like a TV show with the sound off. From my point-of-view he just seemed to become farther and farther away. With each blink, the pauses became longer. I simply began to fade.