Two near misses too near to each other.

In the first, I was mid-crosswalk, the little man in the white LED suit my guidon, when I felt the heat of the engine on my legs and then heard the screech of tires. Funny what you think and do. I hadn't even looked up but I had time to judge the car for not having anti-lock brakes and to imagine the bones in my legs coming apart at the knees before the fight parts of my brain, to my surprise, issued a FUCKING A JESUS CHRIST and tossed my arms up in disgust at the careening two-ton beast. Then I saw the pregnant driver, with her sunglasses on and her legs spread under that balled belly. She waved a hand but didn't stop and I stood there inches from her window, the heat strafing my shins. I turned in the street and stared after her car chugging up the hill, my arms thrust into the air and shouting at the trunk.

The next time, I was in the car, Andrew the passenger. Two young men ran across the street mid-block in a break in the traffic and hopped into a run-down old car with a right-wing bumper sticker half-removed but still clearly legible on the back bumper. My car was the car they ran in front of, but I wasn't planning on hitting them so I didn't pay them any mind until Andrew began to chant, "Whoa WHOA WHOA! like an alarm getting progressively louder. That's when I glanced to see that the car had begun to pull out. I swerved, hit the brakes, and punched the horn so hard that the middle of my steering wheel caved like a pillow. The driver turned around, but it didn't slow him down. He gunned it for the light and tried to turn the wrong way down a one-way street. "High," we said in unison. "That car must've been running," I added. "Drug buy," Andrew mused.

My wrist still hurts from punching the horn.