Abruptly the rain slows to a fine trickle and stops. Both sides of the road are lined with cars, the drivers cautiously waiting out the rain, the tarmac, wet with pooling rainwater, glistening in the rays of the emerging tropical sun. The intense greenery of vegetation, bathed in soft mist of evaporating rainwater, the shell-shocked drivers and passengers looking about as though waking from a dream.

We sit, stunned, on the side of the road. The sky is beginning to clear up just as quickly as it went dark, the squall with its diagonal streaks of rain already at least a mile away. Feeling like we have just surfaced after nearly drowning in a dark cold abyss, trying to catch our breath and put the darkness behind us, still disoriented and unsure of what just happened and how we got there.

The pain is still there, just below the surface, but now it is no longer the raging, red-hot, all consuming beast, but a tired animal, coiled up in a deep borrow, exhausted for now, but still powerful and dangerous. Clarity is returning and with it a strange sense of vitality, a sweet taste of life in the midst of devastation. The colors seem more intense, the sounds more vivid, my skin feels electrified, every fiber of my being resonates to subsonic vibrations.

What changed? What stopped me, made me snap out of the pain-filled stupor? What are these hypertrophied sensations coming to replace the despondency I was plunged into before? Oh yes, the bird… Did it really happen or was it just a figment of my imagination? Where did the squall come from? One moment it was perfectly clear, the sun shining brightly in the cerulean sky, and then everything exploded, like my head, like a plane hitting water… Like a bird smashing into a speeding car?.. No, the squall was not a hallucination – the dark mass to our left and the raindrops, now evaporating on the hood attest to that. But the bird, what was that all about?

I open the door and get out, my legs wobbly, unsteady. Slowly I stagger to the front of the car, fully expecting not to see any traces of the bird. I bend down and there, in the middle of a graveyard of bugs and night months, which met their end the night before, I see what is left of the tiny flying creature: a little wing, a splatter of blood, some stuck feathers... Momentarily I feel the wave wash over me and once again realities overlap. I lose my balance and sit down on the wet gravel. Then, in a few seconds, it passes.

How could this be? In all the years and hundreds of thousands miles I have driven never had a bird fly into my car. Never... That it happened now, in the middle of a thunderstorm, just as I was about to… I push the thought out of my mind. I am a rational human being, not at all given to mysticism, but rather at home with numbers and probabilities. This simply does not fit into my normal set of references. The probability of this event occurring at this precise moment is as close to zero as to be practically indistinguishable. I look up again at the radiator, still half expecting not to see the remains of the bird. No, they are still there: the tiny wing, the splatter of blood and a few stuck feathers. For the third time today I feel realities overlap. All this is so very strange, but deep inside, not far from the coiled dark animal, a glimmer of understanding begins to form.