The first thing William heard was the scrape — a desperate, metallic howl as rubber fought wet asphalt.
The second thing he tasted was rain, thin and cold and carrying the iron tang of something else he couldn't name.
He'd been looking at his phone, stupid and private, thumb paused over the message he'd never send.
The crosswalk light blinked its impatient green and the city poured itself around him: umbrellas like a slow, moving field, reflections jittering in puddles, neon signs arguing with each other. He always told himself he'd pay attention next time.
Next time, he promised. Tonight, like every night loaded with deferred promises, he thought he had time.
Then the van jumped the curb.
It was ridiculous and sudden — like someone had blinked and the world forgot the rules.
One moment there were tires on the road and a driver's tense silhouette hunched in the glare; the next, the vehicle was a beast trying to learn verticality. The driver's horn screamed and someone behind him cursed. People scattered like startled birds.
William froze, stupidly human, half-turning as the metal lunged forward with the casual cruelty of an accident that had been waiting for a reason.
Impact was not a clean line. It was an ugly business — a shove, a slam, a brief dislocation of everything in his chest.
The van didn't have the courtesy to be poetic; it simply turned his body into raw, unarranged motion.
He tasted copper then, true and bright, and the rain mixed with it until the world blurred into watercolor.
The pavement and sky spun and swapped places. A shoe skidded and flapped uselessly.
Someone screamed his name, and it had the wrong tone — nearer to accusation than rescue.
He rolled, hit concrete, and something in his head kept counting down syllables of regret like a broken metronome. Not the big, cinematic regrets at first, but the small ridiculous ones: the half-drunk coffee congealing in the office fridge, the unsent apology tucked in his drafts, the plant on his windowsill he'd forgotten to water for weeks.
Faces flickered in quick exposure: his mother, waving with a spoonful of soup; Mandy, who still left her hair in a messy knot like she'd never gotten the memo about being pretty; the weird barista who always called him by the wrong name and meant it with affection.
It was a montage of unfinished sentences.
Breathing became work — a stubborn, animal thing that wanted more oxygen than his ribs could sell. He found himself laughing once, awkward and off-key, because somewhere between shock and disbelief his brain decided irony was still worth dignity. "Of course," he thought, the word clinging like wet cloth. Of course I get taken out by a delivery van when I could have been bold and rung Mandy, or paid the electric bill, or actually finished a chapter.
Sirens bloomed in the distance and then multiplied, the city's sterile percussion. People gathered at the edges of the scene, the helpless assembling into a jury. Someone was kneeling beside him, voice trembling but ordered — asking questions William did not have the energy to answer. "Can you feel this?" a gloved hand demanded. He could feel a lot of things: the sting of gravel embedded in his palms, the iron warmth spreading across his shirt, the wrongness inside his ribs that felt like a language he'd never learned.
Pain layered itself like weather: first sharp, then spreading, then oddly hollow. He tried to lift his head and found gravity a bully that would not be reasoned with. The rain slid down his face and tasted like the last clean thing he'd ever have.
The city's sounds became muffled, as if someone had pressed a hand against the world's mouth. Words wanted to leave him but the edges of sentences dissolved before they reached his lips.
Light softened, not the white of revelation but the pale blue of a phone screen left on a counter. Shapes drifted — faces of strangers, the soft curve of a passerby's chin, a shopkeeper's hands folding a paper bag. A face hovered that might have been his mother's; he couldn't be sure.
He had the strange, animal certainty that life is awkward, and that death is not tidy. He thought, absurdly, about the absurdity of being remembered for something small. Would people remember his laugh? His habit of leaving one spoon unwashed? The barista's poor attempt at spelling his name?
The sirens were almost here now, immediate and focused, but they arrived as a document, not a cure.
Someone's breath smelled of cigarettes. A hand pressed against his chest and then away, wet with something that could have been rain or blood or both. The world tilted. The rain kept coming, indifferent. He tried to hold to one image — Mandy laughing — and it slid through his fingers like light through a soggy page.
There was no cosmic ledger, no audible voice announcing an afterlife. There was only the soft, bureaucratic flattening of sensation, as if the edges were being filed down.
His heart, traitorously finite and stubborn, gave him one final, honest shove. In that push came a clarity that was not peace but recognition: he had been alive, and he had been messy and often foolish, and he would have liked one more chance.
Then his chest stopped arguing.
The city carried on: footsteps, a car door slamming, the distant pop of a taxi's turn signal. People would later tell stories about the night a man was hit by a van on Elm and how awful the rain made everything look.
Someone would call it a tragedy, someone else an accident. For William, it ended in the small, mean way that real life does — sudden, practical, and utterly unimpressed by his plans.
And then there was nothing.