When a car crashes here in the gulf it’s left out to bake the wreck curls up at the edges, sun-dried steel cluttering the shoulders of every road. Paint broils off in patches, geographies form in the rust. Every desert road a highway of death.

Don’t look away! I know it’s hard to keep regarding one so charred, so disfigured by unfriendly fire and think it once burned with desire.
—Tony Harrison, A Cold Coming

The doctors asked me after so many times, “Nada why are you still crying? Do you know this guy?” but I cannot explain to them.
—Nada Zeidan, Operating Theater Nurse

Nada Zeidan drove her Mitsubishi Lancer off a cliff at 140kph. It’s a miracle she’s alive. Nada treats trauma cases, boys with busted skulls and burned bodies. Boys who come in from the road north.

Their front seats are shoved up, out and over a split dashboard. Upholstery foam flowers out from gashes in burned leather. Nada remembers the snout of her lancer sheared clean off. Just a stump of engine, that last hand-break-turn gone wrong.