Excerpt from Songs of the Dead

Car Accident (p. 14)

From chapter "Places We Do Not See"

There is a woman. She takes a shortcut through an alley. She is thinking, or not thinking, but seeing inside of her what she saw that morning, which was a puppy she gave her son for his birthday four days before. When the puppy wagged his tail he did not so much wag his tail as wag his whole body when he squirmed toward her son, who in turn did not smile so much with his lips and teeth as he, too, smiled with his whole body. This is what she is seeing when she hears the sound that is not a sound but the movement of a sound throughout her whole body, the sharp cracking of lightning as it strikes inside her brain, but does not stop after the bolt has gone; it keeps expanding outward until there is nothing left of her skull and of what was inside her skull, and she is flying, having been struck, and there is nothing but the sound that keeps expanding, and no longer can she see the puppy or her son or anything but the sound that is no longer a sound, but everything she knows.

That is what I hear. When I walk where the car struck her, that is what I hear.