diving through the sky into the earth.

The pale grey concrete highways heading south always remind me of an American freeway, just like the ones on the high speed police chases across California, filmed from a helicopter.
With my window open and my sneakered feet on the dash I tilt my hat forward to block my eyes of the bright warm rays. Every so often we burn across a high bridge suspended over a gorge with tall trees and a river underneath. The shadows of the bridge cables flicker over the bonnet, up my legs and skip over the brim of my hat, one by one.
The dry grass plains are tightly stretched across the horizon, like the skin of a drum. I only wish we didn’t know where we are going so we can improvise a beat on that drum like those outlaws running from the cops do.
I wonder if the dead wombat on the side of the road knew where he was going, or if this hitchhiker in sandals, with her knotted dreads and belly sagging out of her little shirt and over her tight waste band, knows where she is going. The crows on the powerlines I don’t wonder so much about, crows always look like they know exactly what they’re doing and where they are going.
In the corner of my eye I watch some skydivers drifting down from the sky, the parachutes and air gently letting them down. I take my hat off and stick my head out the window to have a proper look. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, one of the five sky divers speeds past all the rest at an incredible pace. Both his body and his parachute are facing the wrong direction. I pull my head in the car to watch this horrific scene through glass. In the car we all catch the sight of this man’s last seconds on earth, before he hits it. All we can do is watch and yell and scream and grab our jaw dropped faces. His arms and legs flail in a terrifying manner as the whole gravitational pull of the planet sucks him down. He disappears behind the trees and we don’t see the impact. The other divers slowly float down towards him. We turn to each other and all swear and cuss for a while, then go back to silent gazing out of the window. The rest of the day goes on like any other day and the incident is never mentioned. Things like that stay in a person’s head somewhere; maybe in some slight way even change them. Maybe I didn’t know where I was going that day after all.