When the bus lost contact with the pavement, it was still traveling the path of the road, but in the wrong lane. And uncomfortably aloft.

As we sailed forward like a low-flying plane, I hoped I might drift toward the windshield with enough intention and elbow room to at least guard my head with my forearms. But I was not alone floating above the seats toward the front of the bus. The full load of passengers was gliding airborne through the pasturelands lining the Pan-Am Highway—and perhaps a few knots faster than the bus itself. There would be no clean landing.

The driver, moored to his seat by virtue of bracing himself with the steering wheel, was madly stomping on the brake pedal, a wild grip paling his knuckles. With the tires spinning two feet above the road, it was a vain attempt to stop the impending tragedy. But what would any of us have done in his shoes?

Here might be the place to declare him a hero of sorts (“futile gestures of rescue”), but I wasn’t sure that he hadn’t launched us into this predicament in the first place through some lapse of attention in that bumpy construction zone. He had a cell phone, after all, like the rest of his flying cargo.

His imagined guilt aside, I realized this was going to be the sum of it for him, just ahead of the rest of us. Surely he would be the first to go, tightly wedged in the front of the action, with nothing but the glass windshield, thick as it was, between him and the 60 mile-an-hour impact. And naturally, this terrible speed would be compounded by whatever was traveling in the opposite direction at the same velocity.

At first I guessed my former seat and aisle mates suspended in this fateful imitation of astronauts might be able to count on the soft flesh of the sacrificial bodies in front of us, whether bony, plump, or fit. But just as quickly, I realized we’d be serving a similar purpose for those from all the emptied seats behind us—forgiving, though fleeting cushions ahead of the blow when our shiny coach slammed into any of the massive impediments that loomed outside—as our trajectory remained a scant few degrees off true parallel to the abandoned highway, headed inevitably straight for the caravan of oncoming trucks, much bigger than our bus and loaded with their tons of doomed freight.

If you’re interested, it’s true what they say about time slowing down when you’re wide-eyed in mid-crisis. I’ve always wondered if this was a gift from the gods for those about to suffer their last breaths. The opportunity to comb the images of your life history, to reckon in your fast-closing allotment. I mean, if you were a god, wouldn’t you consider the merciful bon voyage of such a parting gift?  People endure plenty already, just getting through the years of confusion, navigating the daily groan with inscrutable maps of questionable advice.

In spite of the stakes and this apparent celestial charity, I had yet another distracted peep at something completely peripheral to my situation instead of spending my collapsing milliseconds on grateful reflection. Through a side window, I spied a Charolais cow—that massively sturdy French breed so well suited to the tropics—securely planted on the earth we’d just left and calmly munching the good green, a kinked egret riding her spine and feasting on the insects that bored for her thick, bovine blood. A placid pastoral scene alongside our terror. What a painting we would make for some sadistic artist fresh out of ideas!

This sidelong snapshot I glimpsed and began to digest rather than musing upon my past—from the legion of failings over so many casually wasted decades to the minor triumphs, the family and friends who mattered most. None of that wandered into my attention, I regret to say. Just piling on the immediate images and experiences as if I’d need a toybox full of them in the afterlife. Another greedy draught of the precious now as we drew nearer to impact.

It quickly escalated, this desperate grasping at the moment, like it was the surface of the ocean promising oxygen many fathoms above my lungs. I took notice of the man to my left who’d been quietly snoring for two hours and was now slightly ahead of me, no longer dreaming. To my right, the cross on a woman’s necklace extended toward my face as if taunting a life of meager devotion to spiritual matters. A pair of reading glasses hovered over a paperback’s open pages, still being magnified in someone’s outstretched hand. I scanned the light turquoise ceiling of the bus reflecting the flotsam of the passengers’ fluttering clothes, purses, and lofted hair. Still, nothing from my past.

Soon enough, a great many moving things are going to stop, including me. It’s all I can think of right now. My life is flashing before my eyes, and looking increasingly brief, considering that all I can scrounge in my torpid, disengaged state is the hypnotic present.

– Ran Diego Russell