Smooth by Santana was playing on all four stations on my car's radio. I was smiling playfully as I flipped from one to the next, each at a different part of the song. My daughter was singing the words, after-synced and I was singing with her.

"Let's just forget, same esteemed emotion, under the ocean, under the moon, give me your heart, so smooth." I sang along to four broadcasts of Smooth.

Mariah Carrey's Heartbreaker came on next. I will always associate those two songs with the horrors that followed. "Gimme your luv!"

The rain has a special feeling in Washington. It is like a mist, a hushed-grayness that permeates both sight and sound. Semitrucks share the road with courtesy, hardly ever a problem. Washington drivers have always proven to be the most courteous and considerate. I've never heard anyone honk at anyone else or shout anything angrily. Just good drivers, unironically, from good people.

Rainbows and sunrays through the clouds accompany our dark gray skies. Everything is always green and lush. People smile and greet each other, hold doors open and allow other drivers to go. That's what it's like to drive in Washington State.

For me, everything slowed down and became surreal. I had never experienced a vehicular accident, never felt any stress while driving. My little girl was shrieking in terror. I saw her hand and the back of my car going away from me. I was airborne and upside down. One moment we were on the road, together, and then we were not.

I looked up, wisps of smoke from the airbags hung in flat smoke rings all around. The front of my car was imbedded in the soft shoulder of the road and upright. I staggered out through the missing driver's side door after untangling myself from my seatbelt. There was blood all over me from a tiny cut on my forehead, I was struggling to breathe, a massive dark bruise later formed on my neck and chin. I had cracked ribs and my stomach was ruptured and I had a concussion. I couldn't tell how much damage my body had sustained. I don't recall feeling very much pain, at first. I just walked around, blinking and gasping and quietly calling for my daughter, expecting her to come running up to me. I looked around for my daughter and saw her nowhere. My car was in two places and she was gone.

I shrugged, in shock, and decided I must be mistaken. She wasn't with me, was she? My mind assured me she was with her father. I hadn't picked her up from his place yet. Reassured she was fine, I discarded my initial panic and looked around at the interstate.

The apocalypse I witnessed brought me to my knees. I wept at the carnage and columns of black smoke that were rising. I saw a dead body for the first time in my life. From the look of the remains, it was obviously a corpse.

I wandered the carnage, noticing that the northbound had stopped as they passed the devastation. I could hear sirens. I also could hear more destruction as it was happening some distance along the road.

WASP vehicles wove through the warzone to pursue the rogue semitruck. They had to leave the dead and dying to the first responders and try to stop further destruction.

It was over and my eyes closed. Then it wasn't over and my eyes opened. It will never be over and I will never be unable to see what I saw that day. True horror is a kind of unwanted freedom; being free from knowing that we are so mortal.

I was displaced for a moment, from myself. I became untethered from the reality I've always known. I never really came back. What happened years later and what happened in that moment, in my memory, are the same thing. Time only moves in sequence for those who are unaware that it truly does not. I will say what happened next, and then I will say what happened before. That is how I remember it all.

Over the years I learned a lot about that day. Jazz Mercedes was the driver of the semitruck. He was high on drugs and doubly employed by an Eritrean shipping company. The investigation, into their trafficking of kidnapped American children to be sold as slaves in Africa, needed his cooperation.

The Eritrean family that had bought asylum in the United States was accused of stealing relief money from Ethiopia. They happened to have a fortune equal to the missing relief money. Political asylum and citizenship was granted and their purchases of houses and shipping containers and vehicles were their first step. Later, they were being extensively investigated by the FBI for trafficking.

Jazz Mercedes was questioned and continued to operate anyway. He had a shipping container, mostly full of girls between ten and thirteen, followed by the FBI. When he had realized he was being followed he went crazy.

Special Agent Caprice, Stubborn, told me everything, in exchange for the last detail that I had refused to admit. I had heard what Jazz said before it was all over. I could not repeat his words, not until I knew the truth. Why had they allowed my daughter to die?

I was standing there, questioning deeply with thoughts that I had not yet had. Some part of my consciousness had known true love. Some part of me was still alive inside, while the rest of me died in the flames and rain. I was numb and displaced, but only for the span of a single breath.

Terror washed over me, a physical sensation like I was somehow weightless. It felt like I was falling. I was screaming and crying. I knew my daughter was missing.

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"Please. Please, God. I will go to church and pray to Jesus. Anything. Please just let her be okay." I was praying out-loud to a god I suddenly believed in.

There was a kind of horrible silence, a kind of fear-dripping moment when everything was deathly still. I stood in the middle of the wrecks and fires and the pieces of drivers all around me. Then I slowly began to raise my eyes and look up. He was coming back!

I just stood there, my feet unresponsive to the danger hurtling towards me. The headlights were in my eyes and I could feel its approach through the vibration of the road. Behind the death truck was a swarm of howling and flashing WASPs. A helicopter arrived with a police sniper hanging out the side with a very big gun. They hovered while the entourage slowed and let the truck continue alone.

There was a flash from the helicopter and then a clap. The windshield of the semitruck became a spider's web, catching the driver, stopping him. Except they had missed.

I stood there as the truck zoomed past me, feeling the wind and almost knocked into a stagger from it, reeling. I could have reached out and touched it as it passed. I didn't even flinch, none of it was registering as reality. The truck stopped when more shots obliterated the trailer's tires and the semitruck's engine began to pour smoke from under the hood. The cab filled with smoke and Jazz Mercedes got out.

He had deliberately maneuvered the rig to swing the load back and forth, sweeping everyone else off the road in spectacular demolition. Most semitruck drivers avoid jackknifing, the term for a semitruck with a light load that has lost traction and begun to pendulum and fold against the cab. The sudden stop of the cab can also cause the same thing to happen; always with horrifying results against smaller, nearby vehicles. Jazz Mercedes had done it on-purpose.

The trailer hung at an angle so that the back hatch was angled down towards the road. Something dripped from it. Jazz walked over to it while I slowly limped towards him.

He looked up at me and said with cruel casualness: "Just got to check the merchandise."

With effort he pulled up the lever and the doors swung open as he quickly stepped back. A heap tumbled out onto the road, battered and bleeding. For one split second all I saw was a huge pile of crimson laundry. Then I stared at the pile of dead and dying little girls, blood soaked and tangled in a pile on the road.

Horror held me there, staring. I felt my fear become numb as my mind rejected the minutes. I was still in my car driving and singing with my daughter. None of it could be real. It was not possible.

"The shipment is ruined." Jazz frowned. He kicked the face of a China doll with his boots and caved it in.

"Where is my daughter?" I shivered, the panic rising back up inside me. She was with me when the accident had happened. It was an accident, I decided. A freeway accident and help would arrive any moment. She would be fine. Everything was going to be fine.

I feared otherwise.

Jazz looked at me with the undilated eyes of a shark. He rolled his head around as he did so, adding to the inhuman and predatory gaze. He laughed at me and then he told me what Special Agent Caprice wanted me to tell him:

"Djibouti? Give them a call to Al-Njiri. Tell them the Dream Lion wants to know and they will locate any product for you. It's the least I can do. I had a mother too." Jazz grinned with teeth that never stopped being replaced by sharp new ones. A pelagic predator, entirely reptilian, piscine, inhuman. I did not believe that he had a mother.

"Dream Lion?" I sighed. I realized, in sinking horror, that I was looking at a monster and its handiwork.

He just nodded and flipped out an actual jackknife. I thought he might use it to murder me, and I felt both mortal dread and relief, comingled strangely in my helpless mind. Like creamer poured into coffee: the two feelings swirled and mixed and became one. Fear of death assured me I yet lived.

Then Jazz took his own life, somehow having the willpower to stab himself in the neck and cut through it until he collapsed and bled out on the road. All around me the WASPs and police and emergency vehicles arrived.

The FBI found me and it was the peculiar Special Agent Caprice that gently questioned me until he learned I would divulge vital clues if he would do the same for me. It wasn't our only intimate exchange; I am not sure what compelled me to get so close to him. He trusted me and told me the rest of what was happening. Or he didn't trust me, with that man there really isn't such a thing as trust or honesty. Merely different shades of deception.

One day, years later, he contacted me and asked me to come meet him in the Old Park. We sat together and my body recalled his warmth and tenderness, even while my spirit reviled and despised him. I shuddered in his presence from those conflicting feelings and he hesitated and said:

"I only meant to comfort you." He apologized for a moment from so long ago.

"We both know what it meant." I spoke without regard for his feelings. I didn't think he had any.

"I am not the kind of investigator that accepts that certain people are untouchable, and I am not the sort that finds any manner of conflict with one form of evil in order to ruin a greater one." He described himself to me, wishing I would see him.

I looked away.

"You do not trust me, Ariel, but I trust you. You have nothing to lose by being real and nothing to gain from lying. I've never met anyone I could trust. I love you." He claimed. I sighed. I hated the fact that he loved me, but it was obvious by the way he looked at me after not seeing me for so many years.

"You're crazy." I told him. "Tell me whatever you brought me here for."

"I am trying." He took a deep breath. "We knew who was behind the man who was behind the wheel. You helped me prove it, but they were out-of-reach. So, I took matters into my own hands." He tried to explain himself.

"You wiped them out?" I had heard him saying, between the lines.

"Not myself. I found a way to have it done."

I stood to go. I realized I was not going to keep his secrets, I wasn't going to keep any of it to myself. As I left him there in Old Park, I knew I would have to tell my story. I heard his truth as I walked away and the tears on my cheeks were my 'Amen':

"Love lives; dies. Dies and lives forever."

I sat for a long time and upon my corpse a new thing grew. It blossomed and reached out. It found a way to sing again.

In one way I felt like it was all over. That part of my life was gone, I had become someone else. As a survivor I held the memories of my past and carried them forth into the future. After sharing my story, I was able to again reside in the present. I was able to feel alive and to begin to heal.

I am as a flower upon a grave, I am as the dew, the lullaby and the wings that carry it to a better world that this.