There was a child crying by the road. She mumbled and howled for a long time. I watched her from the kitchen window and waited for some parent or sibling to come and soothe her cries but there was no one. If the girl had a name, I did not know it.
I set my glass in the sink and went out and saw the tarp covered car wreckage about a quarter mile up the highway. The lights on the firetrucks flashed red and yellow and the other cars plodded slowly on past the mangled bits of machinery like clouds and no wind. There was something beautiful in the way the afternoon high sun existed in the unswept glass. How it seemed to reach out of the earth. I turned to the girl. She was crying still.
It's going to be all right, I said.
The skin of the child was white like polished rice. She raised her arm and extended a pale finger toward the death on the highway.
Yeah. I don't know.
When the last of the cars had been towed away she quit on the hot pavement and sat without speaking a word. I stayed with the girl. To the south was the open road and beyond that the coast and beyond all this an ocean bluer than any sky.