Headlights where headlights should not have been.

Glass.

And then this — the long dark, the machines, the voices talking about her as though she were a piece of furniture that had stopped being useful.

In the first weeks she had drifted, unsure whether she was dreaming, unsure whether the dark was death and this was whatever came after.

It was her son’s voice that had eventually convinced her she was still alive, because no afterlife she could imagine would be cruel enough to make her hear that voice and be unable to answer it.

So she had done the only thing left to a woman locked inside a body that would not obey her.