“Holy f**k!” I saw the wreckage first, the blue sedan I recognized as the Wilkes’. I ran to it. The windows were down, because it was summertime, or were they just broken? There was glass and twisted metal everywhere, parts that had definitely fallen from their car, or the second one. Where was it? It had definitely sounded like a two-car collision.
The smell of gasoline and other vehicular fluids permeated the muggy night, that and my first-time smelling blood, fatal injuries, fresh death, though I didn’t know it at the time. “Mrs. Wilkes, can you hear me?”
Her husband was slumped over the steering wheel, a huge chard of glass protruding from his neck. His eyes were open but blank. That and the nauseating limpness in the tilt of his head both told me he was gone.
The passenger door was
