The silver car tumbles end-over-end five times before resting on its roof at the crossroads. A traffic light shifts from red to green, detecting nothing wrong with this arrival, and the headlights glare through the rain, and the wheels keep spinning, flicking their spray at no one in the empty street.

All is quiet. A kebab shop, yellow haze. The stark whiteness of a liquor store and the spatter of residential windows glinting like fairy lights. Faces peeking through the curtains. There’s a scent of sparks from the fireworks behind the terraces, and from the car’s roof where it scraped along the road.

The car sits steaming in the cold, the upside-down world reflected in the wet tarmac. It was the wetness that made the tires slip—tires, illegal, too bald, beige treads—and it was the Jägermeister he’d brought to the party, and the pills still fizzing inside his stomach.

The car’s wheels begin to slow, like a worn-out clock.

Nothing moves but everything speaks—the car speaks, the signs speak. It all speaks, so quiet, so gentle—the whisper of a drain, the birdsong of distant sirens. All of it waits.

They arrive, an ambulance and two police response vehicles, flashing blue-red-blue. The traffic light does its best to recite what happened in its light-language, but none of them listens. The paramedics scurry to the scene, urgent and cautious and tired from the long night. The police chatter like budgies into their radios. They await instruction.

But no instruction comes, for the world slows, slows.

It slows and slows and slows to an imperceptible crawl.