Around five years ago, I witnessed something that has haunted me ever since, and I’m sure will continue to for the rest of my life. I was on my way to the store one evening when I spotted a stranger smoking in an alley I was passing. It was a man in a beige suit, standing in the middle of the alley, facing the street I was on. As I passed by, I thought to address him, as he seemed out of place.

“Having a cigarette?”

“Yeah, sometimes I like to smoke down here…”

As he finished the only sentence I ever heard from him, something illuminated his face, a light coming from behind me. With the last words escaped his lips, the light grew suddenly brighter, and before either me or the man had understood what was going on, something rocketed past my head with a deafening roar. A motorcycle, going at least 100 miles per hour, sailed through the air into the alley and crashed directly into the man’s face. It hit that guy right in the mouth. The motorcycle and its rider must have shattered spectacularly against the building opposite, but it's not something I clearly remember from that night. The sight of the motorcycle’s front wheel annihilating the poor man’s head had shocked me too deeply. The monstrous momentum of the bike transferring into his skull as his suddenly limp body violently jerked back and downwards, leaving his legs momentarily flailing in the air, is something I relive every time I walk past that place. The sound of the approaching engine and the metallic impact still wake me up occasionally, even after all these years.