It was small. There was no explosion, no scream, no flash of light. It was simply a puff of smoke and a jolt that made me get out. I smelled the white smoke swirling through the air, and I heard the coughing right next to me. My small hands fumbled with the red button to my side, and staying silent, I released the buckle. In a matter of seconds, the door next to me was pushed open, and I almost fell onto the open grass under the bright, shining stars.

“It was a deer.” Of course it was a deer. Through the blur of pulled over cars and blinding headlights crossing over each other, I realized what they were telling my mom.
“It was huge.”
“It just ran across and hit you!”
“I don’t know what it was doing there.”
I imagined a leaping, swift creature tremendously leaping against traffic, dodging cars until it happened to collide with ours. I stood to the side, looking to the rushing lines of cars not caring about the crowd that seemed to be in another world. I also looked to the woods towering to our right like shadowy giants, imagining the deer making an escape. I could see its large brown body quickly speeding away from view. The few people who cared had pulled their cars over in an instant, and eventually I could make out a police siren wailing at us. He was a white notebook, a blue hat, a slow car, and a stoic face. He did what he was supposed to do, and asked the questions he had to ask.
“Did it run head on?”
“That’s what people told us.”
“Did it actually make contact with its antlers or its head?”
“I don’t know, my dad was the only one who saw it coming at us.”
He looked at the cracked windshield, the exploded airbags, and kept doing his job. People came and left. Some looked concerned, some looked bored, and most did not notice me. It passed by me in an instant, a 7 year old too young to know.

My grandfather knew. Sitting in the front by my mom, he saw it come crashing in. I think it might have been the shock, maybe the crash itself, but I saw him lying down on a bed of white, staying still off to the side. They took him to a hospital, and one by one, everyone left us alone standing at the side of the road in the darkness. That moment made me prepared for anything else. It opened my eyes and I saw that many things had changed because of one unlucky happening. We all could tell. We drove home quietly, and I still did not speak, staring at the cracked windshield that looked like a fractured spider web, shining on us. I remembered all the details very carefully for myself. But I knew that it was all right. I knew that we were okay.