Congratulations on Losing All That Weight!

The lines will be rolling by the way they always do at night, the dashes separating the lanes making their own rhythm, granting order to the chaos of the night. When you crest the gradual rise and start coming down on the other side of the mountain those dashes will be all you can see, the fog will be so thick.

You’ll keep the car in gear as you coast down, wind whipping the air around you and drowning out the sound of Tom Waits. The night will be magical. It’ll be perfect. You’ll rummage for a few seconds until you find a cigarette, then remove one hand from the wheel to light it.

As if on cue a cargo truck will pass you on the right. It’ll swerve gently, like a drunken, overweight dancer, for a few precious seconds, and you won’t be able to take your eyes off it. Along with the fog and the lines it’ll just seem like part of the magic of highway 26 in the winter.

But it’ll become apparent that it isn’t quickly. The truck will pull into the left lane ahead of you unexpected, braking against the hill’s incline. The driver will fire the air brake incorrectly at just the wrong moment and the payload will ram into the cab. There won’t be any visible damage from the collision but the payloadwill start to surge like a wild thing in your mind.

A period of a few seconds will pass underwater as it tumbles and tears itself free of the cab, shoves the cab into the lane of oncoming traffic and bounces impossibly downhill. You’ll put your foot down on the break but you won’t be fast enough. On the second bounce you’ll move forward, the front end of your sedan underneath the payload as it falls.

It will catch your vehicle just behind the engine block, ceasing the car’s forward motion and redirecting all the force of motion from the wheels to the frame. The cabin of your vehicle will twist and buckle and you’ll feel it surge up to meet the rolling mass of the shipping container, even before it fills your vision and brings stillness back to the night

When your body is found it will be in three pieces. Your head will still be attached to most of your torso, your legs will be separated. Fortunately for the officers investigating the scene and the paramedics your remains will have mostly stayed inside your vehicle. The fog will have lifted by the time they finish their work and the only evidence of the magic you experienced will be a cigarette burn in your leg where the chassis of your car twisted your arm and pushed the burning tip into your own body before forcing your hand open.

The physically observable consequence of this night be that the part of you we consider you will now weigh almost half of what it once did. Which is great news because you’ve been wanting to drop that poundage for a while. So congratulations on losing all that weight, and try to look on the bright side.