"No-one seriously harmed" in Kimberly car crash

With renewed lucidity, we sped toward the scene of the crash—urgency more or less conveyed by the ailing engine's guttural belch which was, in fits and starts, both recalcitrant and determined. My co-reporter, Mikal, a surly and dependable man of about forty, strummed absent-mindedly his stout thumb and forefingers against the dull patina of the dashboard. This imaginary, virtuosic bass guitar solo went on for a few minutes (gratuitous, by any yardstick) until both it and the music playing aloud on the stereo system—soft-rock, eighties, inoffensive—were crudely interrupted by a formal-sounding, New England accent.

"We interrupt this—" the disembodied voice began... The subsequent words trailed off in a vague sludge: leaden waveforms that seemed to physically weigh down the car, its surroundings distorted by the emergent microgravity into amorphous, incidental swathes of grey-green. The spectre that we had sought to outrun had, with a certain inevitability, caught up to us once again. In fact, in a cruel and unnecessary twist of fate's knife, the breaking news announcment was itself derailed by another such proclamation some thirty seconds later.

"So, where to now?", Michael pondered, his thinly disguised despondency belied by heavy, sunken shoulders atop limp, languoruous arms. The question was at once pragmatic and existential.

In a recurring dream, I find myself flapping a haphazard backstroke through crystalline ocean, eyes screwed shut in defiance of the stinging sun's stare. Whenever my hopeless, flailing limbs fall into some semblance of synchrony, the ungainly dance is upset by cascading waves sent shoreward by some distant boat. I choke down that familiar, unwelcome cocktail of seawater and pride, and awaken with a startled, salty splutter. The sedan, with an exasperated sigh, slowed to an unspectacular standstill, rendering at least one sense of Mikal's question academic.