A young woman had gone through amber and swerved onto the pavement to avoid an oncoming Volkswagen. She ran over and killed six people before careening into a wall. The expensive car’s safety features had saved her life. In five minutes, even before the ambulance had time to arrive, bodyguards were on the scene to protect her from any angry onlookers. A story as old as time. You’re standing at a junction, thinking about love, death, duty, and all your predicaments, and then you’re gone.

One car, over there, had rammed a pedestrian. This one had ploughed into another head on. That one fell off a bridge, or was it crumpled by a bin lorry? Regardless, they were all brought here to quietly rust and disintegrate under the open sky after Maria had performed her silent interrogations.

Jiggling her leg in thought, Maria finished off the sandwich and took a sip of her hot coffee. Her mind wasn’t on the Lexus and the obliterated lives, but on how things swing from one extreme to another. The transition that kept sweeping the ground from under her.

The letters had started coming again. A fever swept through like a typhoon leaving a trail of ruined houses and overturned cars. Clinging melancholy replaced the itchy nervousness, clouding Maria’s senses. Everything had become complicated and confusing. Despite her fear and suspicion, she could not disguise her gladness at hearing from Fryderyk again. She was fiendishly glad. The letters were vile. And yet, they summoned a bittersweet feeling of liberation so lacking in the corner into which she had backed herself. That clinging feeling seeped into the void within like glue or sap leaking from a mutilated tree.

The rain had ceased momentarily. Ragged clouds illuminated by the sun floated over the October city. It was cold and windy. This place on the outskirts was dismal, but it suited her mood and Maria was in no hurry to leave. She sat there after doing her rounds, looking at the wrecked cars and thinking, just how people sit on a bench in a cemetery for a bite and to dwell on life. She patted the once sleek, now cracked metal of the bonnet.

A worker walked by and greeted her.

“Hello there Maria Alexandrovna, how are you doing?”

“All good, thanks. Could I cadge a cigarette?”

She lit the cigarette and headed out. Maria knew the story of almost every steel corpse along her path. That Skoda Fabia had been concertinaed by an SUV jumping a light. The driver and passenger died on the spot. Approaching the car, Maria frightened away the sparrow snacking on crumbs. The passenger had been carrying a cake in a box wrapped with a bow. A religious icon—Save and Protect—had tumbled onto the passenger seat.

The contents of the cars were collections of mundane items: water bottles, lighters, sweets, gloves. Nothing that would ever be of any more use to anybody.