{"id":15,"date":"1995-03-18T16:46:55","date_gmt":"1995-03-18T16:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/?p=15"},"modified":"2026-09-27T13:22:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T13:22:04","slug":"the-second-impact","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/","title":{"rendered":"The Second Impact"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A fictional story inspired by an Aurora, Illinois traffic crash report \u2014 by Sherman Doss<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Fiction notice:<\/strong> This story uses details visible in the attached 1995 police report as a factual framework. The source report does not state that Sherman Doss’s family was killed. The deaths, family members, dialogue, thoughts, and surrounding events below are invented for dramatic purposes. The accident-photo sheets referenced at the end are from the source report.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Prologue \u2013 The File<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For years the file had been reduced to a number, a date, and a stack of black-and-white pages: Aurora, Illinois. March 17, 1995. Eola Road at Montgomery Road. A traffic crash that, on paper, occupied only a few boxes, a hand-drawn diagram, a follow-up report, and photographs whose grain made the twisted metal look almost unreal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sherman Doss kept returning to those pages because the paper seemed too calm. Forms are good at being calm. They turn motion into arrows, terror into check marks, and the sound of metal folding into a sentence written in an officer’s hand. A report can describe impacts and damage. It cannot record the moment a life divides into before and after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this fictional telling, Sherman was not alone in the car that morning. His family was with him. They had left home talking about ordinary things \u2013 whether they were late, whether the radio was too loud, whether they should stop for breakfast. Those small disagreements would become sacred in memory because they were the last pieces of an ordinary morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapter One \u2013 The Red Light<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The light at Montgomery held them longer than Sherman expected. He sat southbound on Eola Road with both hands on the wheel, watching cross traffic move through the intersection. The family talked behind and beside him, their voices overlapping in the familiar rhythm of people who believed they had the rest of the day together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the world arrived from behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first impact was violent enough to erase direction. Sherman felt the car jump forward. His chest tightened against the belt. A scream cut through the cabin. Before his mind could name what had happened, the vehicle spun, turning the intersection into a blur of pavement, glass, sky, and dashboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second impact came from the front. The car was already moving in a direction Sherman had not chosen. The airbag exploded open. The cabin filled with powder and the bitter smell of deployment. For an instant he could hear nothing except a high, thin ringing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came silence \u2013 not true silence, but the strange silence after violence, when distant traffic and human voices seem to belong to another world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapter Two \u2013 What the Paper Could Not Say<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sherman tried to turn toward his family. His body answered slowly. The windshield had become a fractured field of light. Somewhere outside, someone was shouting for help. He called the names he knew better than his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the fiction of this story, the answers never came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emergency crews arrived. Doors opened. Hands reached into the car. Sherman remembered pieces: a face above him, the scrape of equipment, cold air entering through broken space, the repeated instruction not to move. He kept asking about his family until a responder stopped answering the question directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the hospital, time became fluorescent. A clock moved, but Sherman did not. A doctor finally sat down rather than standing. That was the first thing Sherman understood. People stand when they expect to leave quickly. They sit when the words are going to change your life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The family he had driven into the intersection with that morning was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grief did not arrive as crying. Not at first. It arrived as disbelief. Sherman kept replaying the red light. He remembered stopping. He remembered waiting. He remembered the impact from behind and the violent spin. His mind searched for a different movement he could have made \u2013 one second earlier, one foot farther forward, one glance in another direction \u2013 as though memory could be edited until everyone survived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapter Three \u2013 The Follow-Up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Later, Sherman went to the Aurora Police Department because the first account of the crash did not match what he remembered. He explained that he had been stopped when another vehicle struck him from behind, causing his car to spin, and that he was struck again. The follow-up report became important to him because it preserved the existence of a second account of how the collision unfolded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An officer examined the vehicle photographs and noted substantial damage at both the left-front and left-rear areas, along with deployed airbags. To Sherman, the photographs were no longer pictures of a machine. They were the last physical landscape his family had occupied together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He studied every shadow in them. The crushed panel. The broken contour of the front corner. The rear damage. The ordinary wheel still attached to a car that no longer looked ordinary. He knew photographs could not testify to love, but they could testify that force had passed through that space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapter Four \u2013 The Second Impact<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Years passed, but Sherman came to understand that the crash had two impacts. The first belonged to the intersection. The second happened afterward and repeated itself whenever a siren passed too close, whenever tires squealed behind him, whenever a traffic light held him still long enough for his mind to return to Eola and Montgomery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People told him survival was a gift. He learned that a gift could also be heavy. Survival carried birthdays that no longer had a person attached to them, empty chairs at holidays, and questions with no useful answer. It carried the unbearable mathematics of one person walking away when the people he loved did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually he stopped asking the file to explain grief. That was never its job. The report could preserve positions, statements, damage, and official observations. The rest belonged to memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He placed the photographs back into the folder. This time he did not close it immediately. He looked at the wrecked car and allowed himself to remember the morning before the impact: voices in the cabin, an unfinished conversation, the impatience of a red light, the certainty that there would be another breakfast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was what the accident had taken from him \u2013 not only people, but the assumption of later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that was what Sherman chose to reclaim. Not the accident. Not the final seconds. The life before them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Documentary Source Note<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The source is a seven-page Aurora Police Department FOIA\/crash-report packet. The accident photographs are the photo sheets appearing on pages 5\u20137 of that packet. They are documentary source images; the fatal-family storyline in this story is fictional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

View the complete PDF, including the accident-photo sheets<\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fictional story inspired by an Aurora, Illinois traffic crash report \u2014 by Sherman Doss Fiction notice: This story uses details visible in the attached 1995 police report as a factual framework. The source report does not state that Sherman Doss’s family was killed. The deaths, family members, dialogue, thoughts, and surrounding events below are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-15","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51,"href":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15\/revisions\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/austinblockletter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}