I shift down a gear as my car goes light.  The road humps and troughs, forcing me into my seat.  Windows down, a recently dead singer screams through the speakers.  It’s one thing to hear a dead singer who has always been dead, but hearing a voice recently lost… that is something I’ll never get used to.

Or the visions.  I overtook myself earlier; a young boy dressed in dark green, huffing and puffing uphill on a bright orange bicycle.  The place where I used to work, where I used to cycle to, burned down years ago.  I don’t know why, in one reality, I’m still trying to get there.  Maybe it’s a genuine rescue attempt.  Perhaps it is an empty gesture born from a pathless, meandering existence.  The last option terrifies me.

As the village draws near I flashback to the dream I had of us walking together in a snowy field, where the trees thrashed in a hurricane, and yet we didn’t hear or feel anything except each other.  Our ears rang with silence and our tread left no footprint.  Your ungloved hands were warm on my cheek.  I realise, having overtaken the past, I’ve now collided with it.

On a tight corner, the remains of a crashed car hangs – pathetically – upside-down.  Around it, rusted skeletons of former accidents sleep peacefully in the ditches and the brambles.

I stamp the brakes.  Real or not, the boy on the orange bicycle is not ready to see his own ending.