God's Gift to Women Audio Excerpt

A road is a clock laid over the land, a mechanism of ramps and lanes and accidents. Speed into Distance, our surest measure of Time. It is the day before Easter, 1976. The back roads of mid-April have sat untended, unprotected, and now, like a trick doormat set out for visitors, a sheet of black ice covers a swatch of this narrow, two-lane bridge on the outskirts of Princeton Junction. Two strangers approach at once through the thick fog. Angie, who fails to see it coming and then panics when she feels the bulky Lincoln Continental that belongs to her mother start to slide so that her foot, the high-arched and red toe-nailed foot which would tease Scott under the table when they sat across from each other at lunch, instinctively slams the brakes and the car begins its spin in a clockwise direction. Time and gravity speeding up, the headlights reeling like an electric minute-hand and the vein pulsing in her delicate neck counting the seconds. Now the path of the man in the opposing lane is blocked by the full broad width of Angie’s mother's car, so he strikes it. Going 70 miles per hour he crashes into her at a perfect right angle, forming for half a second the ideal tension of a vertical crossing into a horizontal before the metal and the chrome, the plastic and the flesh, have a chance to twist or crumple. With the life speeding out of her counterclockwise, this unexplained element in a particle accelerator, the atomic Angie, the girl Scott will never see again, is propelled by the collision’s force through the windshield. Her corpse and a small gift she has bought for him are pulled from the bridge's gravel shoulder.