She stayed awake all night, trying to decide whether to make a scene or not. She decided if she was already anxious about being late on the first day of their holiday, that prob­ably wasn’t a good sign. You can’t be late for a vacation, that’s precisely the point of a vacation: it annihilates time. We do not age while we enjoy a holiday. Life just gets enriched; everything stops for a moment so we can indulge ourselves while time is paused, we can focus on ourselves, turn our mind’s eye inward, while still to some extent keeping an eye on the landscape, the hotel walls and windows, the bountiful breakfasts, purely for aesthetic and culinary reasons, because these will be the memories to be cherished later on.

That’s how Luca saw it by the time they started. She drove. There was barely any traffic, maybe because of the maddening heat, although in the opposite direction there was a traffic jam. Luca pictured the cars as animals running away from a burning forest or a slaughterhouse and now being herded together again by the two-lane highway in order to enter the same burning forest or slaughterhouse through a different gate. She caught a scent of blood in her nose and tried to divert her thoughts. She turned on the radio. On the local station some male choir was chanting songs without any semblance of a melody.

Robi leaned his head against the window like he was about to go to sleep, but he just stared blankly at the road. He had stubble on his face, and it made him look like a stranger. Robi shaved meticulously each and every morning – except this one. It’s because of the holiday, Luca thought, you don’t have to shave on a holiday. You just have to focus on yourself. Robi tore his eyes away from the road and looked at Luca.

‘What?’ she asked. Robi shrugged his shoulders.

Luca knew exactly what was coming. Some brief, shallow chit-chat about last night, who made out with whom at the company, who said what, what minor misunderstandings were settled or created, and who at what point got drunk enough to pull down his pants. They would laugh at the somewhat funnier stories, or shake their heads in disdain at the disgusting ones.

However, this conversation did not take place. They both knew in advance what they would have said, and not uttering those thoughts left a deeper mark in their minds than the sudden collision itself.

The moment it happened they didn’t understand a thing. After the impact Luca stepped on the brakes, for the chances of survival are higher in a stopped car than a moving one. A crack stretched across the windshield, limiting vision. She looked into the rearview mirror. There was no other car there, nor could she see a corpse anywhere.