I think I hear the woman’s screams before the collision, but I know that can’t be right. It isn’t a matter of my being nineteen and freshly debuted; few people in this city have ever encountered an automobile accident and it’s only natural that I understand the woman’s sounds first. It is anguish, a tearing as of something delicate and sacred. It is a moment that divides her life into the time before this tragedy and the time after.

When I turn to face the chaotic scene, men are hustling in seemingly every direction and their purpose is unclear. Someone, a stranger turned guardian, turns the woman from the sight and holds her to his chest. Others stand in the intersection, keeping the offending motorist from leaving the scene, and still others begin to huddle around the broken body of the victim. In their midst there is a very young girl, forgotten in the madness. She stares down at the mangled body of her father and, for a few crucial seconds, no one thinks to obstruct her view.

The smell is thick and alarming, wafting to our side of the intersection as if in a hurry to spread. If the smoke and sizzle are any indication, it will linger a long while. The fragrance of roasting meat is the final insult, stealing what remains of the fallen man’s dignity. It isn’t a charred smell, as when a fire cooks too quickly, but a savory musk. An ordinary and enticing aroma that means the automobile must have branded him through his clothes and that his flesh still cooks.

Together with the endless stare of his daughter, the almost sweet smell of the man’s flesh sends me into hysterics. This moment is the first of its kind in Montreal, and so is the dead man. On all sides of the accident, pedestrians, streetcar patrons, and motorists alike vacillate between hysteria and calm. There is no way to know which will become the standard response when automobile accidents become commonplace.

But there is something else. An understanding that this is possible. It is possible to be killed by the most prized of possessions, to be destroyed by the greatest invention of our time. It is possible to die in the street no matter how you began the day. This is the first universal truth I have ever come by on my own and it multiplies like fire. Because if this is possible—if sudden death is no respecter of persons—so must every horrid thing be.