[For Dovina, as always.] One casualty - fortunate, as these things go. (The oncoming driver, drunk or overtired, thinking about his wife, a song or nothing, escaped unhurt.) Inevitable, they said. Common enough, at any rate. Bound to happen once to any of us, given world and time enough. And always more-or-less the same. Except the flying man. He'd been in that rear lavatory. Freshening up, I imagine. At least, he seemed the freshening-up sort. Probably used the phrase "God-fearing" once in his life, uncynically. Or "Old fart" (also self-reference.) There's a kind who use bus lavatories, who call them lavatories - the humble, endless opiners, insufficiently loved for what they are: white streaks of light waiting. Grandfather-puffy. Or else a professor, a doctor, maybe. Surely, there was some ideology involved. Some extra lift, shot him - what, four times himself down the aisle, a thrilling upward half a parabola. The downward too, then. But, before that, the windshield; so as much of him continued up as fell (if you believe ballistics end in that instant: the soul transforms into an up-falling rain of pebbled glass.) I can tell you, the physics of the thing are suspect. For in the time he took to clear the dash, I saw him wide-eyed soaring - startled, yes, yet lit with something you'd call beatific but for belonging to a man with his pants half-buckled. I had time enough to think how he must see us there: all curtailed somehow, collapsed ingloriously into our facing seatbacks, babies smothered, a shameful akimbo of limbs like sleepers' - our own truncating ideologies holding us back, he'd know. But he - Man! He was the one flying.