It was a cool winter’s night. I’d gone out with a couple buckets of a deïcing mixture I’d concocted (salt and beet juice work surprisingly well) to take care of a patch of black ice that had historically—well, historically to me, anyways—caused an eight-car pileup that had resulted in something like fifteen deaths. The accident took place at 10:04 PM according to the papers; I went out there at about 9:15 and set to work.

I didn’t really see her at first; she had been watching me from behind the trees and had been dressed all in white. I noticed her slowly approaching me with a slow, steady determination that reminded me of a machine.

There had been something in her face that was different this time. Something about its shape, almost as if the face I had seen all those centuries had been a mask, a façade, but that it was now starting to fail, or that I was somehow becoming resistant to its effects. I couldn’t quite place why she suddenly looked so familiar.

And then it, and she, hit me.