The front trailer teetered on the edge of the road about fifty feet down the hill from where the rear one went over. Jim thought it might have had a chance if the snow berm had been higher. As it was, inertia and momentum took charge and over it went, rolling at least half a dozen times, the doors bursting open and more pallets breaking apart and more boxes flying everywhere to explode upon impact. Cans of soup and green beans and tomato paste, bags of pasta and popcorn and potato chips, sacks of rice and sugar and flour, six-packs of juice and pop, bottles of vanilla and soy sauce and red wine vinegar, boxes of Ziploc bags and Equal, packages of toilet paper and paper towels, it all tumbled down in a runaway landslide of commercial goods. Jim, watching from the safety of the ditch, said in an awed voice, “I’ve never really appreciated the phrase ‘bombs bursting in air’ before.”

“It is kinda like Da Nang,” Hazen agreed.

—“Wreck Rights”

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