By Sunshine Zéa Leeuwon

The road doesn’t remember. The cars don’t slow. The highway swallows everything — blood, fur, bones — until only memory remains.


Death reaches his cold, spindly hands into my chest and says, I’m going to rip this away from you.

There is no warning. No negotiation. Just the taking. The brutal, indifferent severance of one thing from another — life from body, warmth

from skin, before from after. Death doesn’t wait for us to be ready. It doesn’t ask if we can bear it. It simply takes. 

Once, on a road trip, I passed by twenty-three dead raccoons on the highway. I didn’t mean to count. It wasn’t a morbid game or a compulsive tic. But the number stacked up anyway, pressing itself into my brain like tire treads into asphalt. One. Two. Three. I tracked them the way I track time, the way I keep tally of the things I’ve lost but can’t quite name.

Some of them were still fresh, tangible as bodies rather than just outlines. Fur caught in the wind like it might lift from the ground and start running again. Blood that hadn’t yet sunk into the road, pooling in the crevices where the pavement split. Others had already started to fade, breaking down into something less distinct. Scattered bones, patches of matted fur, the slow, inevitable erasure of what they had been. I didn’t stop.

I could have. I could have pulled over, stepped out, walked back to kneel beside them. I could have reached out, pressed a hand against their little bodies, checked for the impossible warmth of something still alive. But I didn’t. Because I knew the truth before I even passed them.

They were gone, and it would hurt too much to hold that knowledge in my hands. So I drove on. As if distance could put space between me and the weight of knowing. As if sadness and remorse were enough of a payment. They’re not. They never are.

I have been both the driver and body left behind.

I have been the corpse on the asphalt, waiting for someone to notice. Waiting for someone to stop.

I was eleven when my father got sick. I watched the slow unraveling of a body that had once carried me, lifted me onto shoulders to see fireworks, held my hand in parking lots so I wouldn’t suddenly drift away. The hospital had smelled sterile and cold, a place where time stretched and folded, where minutes felt like hours and entire nights vanished into the air like smoke.

People would move swiftly past us in the hallway, eyes flicking away. It wasn’t their grief to hold. They had their own heaviness waiting for them somewhere else.

When it finally ended, I did what I had always done. I drove past it. I packed my days full of movement, filled the empty spaces with work, with school, with anything but the knowing. I convinced myself that forward was the only direction. That if I kept going fast enough, I could outrun the thing pressing against my chest, the monster curling around my ribs like vines in the dark.

But the thing about loss is that it waits. It lingers in the rearview mirror, growing smaller but very truly disappearing. I think about those raccoons sometimes, the way I think about all the things I’ve let slip by, the moments I let dissolve into distance because facing them felt impossible. The words left unsaid, the hands I never reached for, the faces I let blur into memory before I had the courage to really see them.

I have been the one who kept moving when I should have stopped.

There’s something about roadkill that guts me every time, more than that of merely seeing the corpse. The way a body lays broken on the asphalt, fur split like fabric, blood pooling in delicate shadows beneath. The way eyes, glazed and empty, stare at nothing. They don’t close. No one closes them. The world keeps moving, cars rushing past in a blur, indifferent to the ruin beneath their wheels. And that’s what makes it worse. Not just the death itself, but the way it goes unnoticed. The way something can exist one moment, whole and alive, and be discarded the next, flattened into the pavement like it was never here at all.

It isn’t just animals. It’s everything. The way people move past wrecks on the road, their eyes skimming over the twisted metal, the shattered glass, the dark stains spreading across concrete. The way we glance away from the man huddled on the street corner, the woman with the cardboard sign at the stoplight. We don’t want to look too long. We don’t want to carry that knowing, because knowing comes with burden, and burden is a leaden weight.

Still, I see my own reflection in every broken thing. That’s why it lingers for me. Why the image of each body stays burned into my memory long after I’ve left them behind. They are proof of something I don’t want to name. They remind me that everything I love is fragile, that it only takes one mistake — one misstep, one wrong moment — for it all to be gone.

When I drive, my eyes instinctively scan every trash bag and shredded tire along the highway, searching for their small, broken bodies — desperate to make myself bear witness.

A deer, crumpled on the shoulder of the road, its legs twisted at impossible angles, ribs caved in like something hollowed it out. A fox, fur still bright and red, but insides spilled across the road like an opened fruit. A bird, wings outstretched as if caught mid-flight. A cat, curled as if it had only meant to sleep. A dog, its collar still on, its owner waiting somewhere, wondering why it never came home.

I imagine being that animal on the road, having that one awful second of realization before impact. In that final, swift moment, knowing that there was no escape.

But even when death is quick, its weight is slow. It presses into the places we don’t expect, filling the quiet moments between heartbeats, lurking in the spaces where something should be but isn’t. I feel it in the silence of an empty house, in the hush before sleep, in the memory of laughter that doesn’t belong to this moment. Loss is never just a singular event — it is a tide, dragging and relentless, breaking us down grain by grain in an unending war.

Desperate, I tell myself that grief is a form of currency. That my sadness, my guilt, my inability to let go, somehow balances the scale. That if I feel the weight of it enough, it counts for something. But it doesn’t. The road doesn’t remember. The cars don’t slow. The highway swallows everything, blood and fur and bones, until there is no evidence left. Until the world goes on exactly as it did before.

But, regardless, I carry it with me. The sight. The grief. I dream about it sometimes. Not about death itself, but the aftermath. The stillness. The feeling of being unrecognizable. In the dream, I’m standing in the middle of the highway. There is no sound except for the wind, and the low, far-off hum of something coming. I look down, and there I am. Not standing, not whole, just pieces. I try to move, to speak, but I am merely what that once was. And the cars don’t stop.

I recall those raccoons. Those other little bodies I’ve seen on the road. The deer. The fox. The bird. The cat. The dog. I tell myself I must remember, because memory is the only monument for the forgotten. Or else they’re just gone. Nothing but bones and asphalt. Nothing but emptiness. Nothing at all.

But absence is never truly empty. The weight of what is gone still presses into the world, shaping it, haunting it, making it heavier in ways we don’t always see. Maybe someone else, driving down some stretch of highway, will see what I saw. They’ll count too. They’ll feel the same ache, the same knowing that some things are too fragile for the speed at which we move.

This is the deal we make every time humanity moves through the world. We will take, and we will lose. We will keep driving, because we have to. Because stopping won’t change anything. Because grief is a weight that never settles, only shifts.

But the things we’ve lost remain. Flattened into the road, waiting for someone to notice. Waiting for someone to remember.
And I will. I always will. ■