Looking for someone to talk to and joke with was a natural instinct driving on a day like today. The massive, gray, nimbostratus rows have a mesmerizing effect as they line up with a road that is the same color and has been since South Carolina very early this morning. Gary Travers hears a really good joke about short women with large breasts on the CB. He laughs hard for a minute—laughs like he hasn’t laughed in a long time. He has to close his eyes he’s laughing so hard, and in the next instant realizes two cars have stopped dead ahead in the left lane and he must slam on the brakes. He does so. Had the moisture and light rain not brought the oil in the road to the surface he might have stopped in time.

The eighteen wheels of his shipping truck do not respond gracefully as the rubber tread halts and slides across the concrete of the highway, smoking, screaming, leaving a trail of parallel black lines across the gray concrete until finally an old brown Buick halts the progress of the heavy truck, absorbing the leftover momentum into its rectangular body as it is hurled down the road, careening off the car in front of it and flipping over on its side.