The tale of the horse that tried to kill me.

I suppose I should really get around to writing out this story and how it made me feel - one, because it's an interesting story and two because it made me feel a whole gamut of emotions that I want to crystallise because they were particularly interesting.
So.
I'll set the scene. It is about 5:30 in the morning in Fiji, and we are in a van on our way to the airport in order to catch our flight home. Our driver is travelling down some winding roads through villages at quite a fast pace. I was seated in the front passenger seat, and the entire family are seated in the back. Most of us are leaning on our seatbelts and trying to rest. I, for most of the trip, had sat with my knees drawn up to my chin and my head on the seatbelt, however, I had just sat up and stretched my legs out beneath me, leaning back straight against my seat. I am aware that had I not made this move, I would have not have survived what happened next. My eyes, unfortunately, were shut.
There was a dull crump sound and then a lot of things started to happen.
I don't remember the airbag hitting my face - I didn't even feel the burns it left until a little later on - but I do remember the car careening wildly and the driver swearing. Everyone was yelling. From what I heard later, most of them were pitched out of their seats, and my younger stepbrother cut his hand open on a bit of flying glass. But of course I was more concerned with my own predicament at this point.
The entire dashboard of the car had caved in. The windshield was shattered and slanted inwards, almost at a point. The glovebox, had I still had my knees under my chin, would have broken my legs. As it stood the glovebox was a scant ten centimetres from entering my stomach. Understandably, in the four seconds it took for the driver to get the car to a stop, I emptied my lungs yelling, as did everyone else.
As the car stopped, I found myself unable to open the door, as the handle was completely obscured by caved in dashboard. Instead I had to wriggle over the seat - marvelling at the vast amount of broken glass beneath me that somehow, miraculously, did not cut me. We got out and I took stock of our surroundings. The driver, through immense skill, had stopped us pitching off the road. We had stopped dead in the middle of a lane, and there was a horse lying on the road just behind the van, stone dead.
Now, as horrible as this sounds, there is a punchline to this story - but I won't get to it just yet. I said I wanted to cover my feelings while they were fresh - so to speak - in my mind, and I will.
The first thing I did when I got out of that van was pray.
Which I feel I should examine because I'm not one for prayer. It's interesting that even the most anti-religious person, when faced with something so overwhelmingly fortunate as to survive something that should have killed them, will probably hold a glimmer of spirituality. I shudder to think of the athiest, who, on his deathbed, sees the shining light and says to himself "Oxygen deprivation to my brain..." and thus dies and misses the bigger picture. And I was annoyed with myself - that it took something like my impending demise in order to incite such thoughts in my brain. Even now, with this event a week past, I find it difficult to have faith. At the time though, I knew. I knew something was watching over me.
The other emotion that I wanted to examine was cold fury. Interesting that in that white-hot moment, in that instant were I was pretty convinced my existence was going to come to an end, all I had room for was blinding rage. I didn't even have particular room for fear - all there was was shock, and then anger. Lots of anger.
I suppose I was so angry because my life at the moment is quite wonderful. I had been a week in Fiji - a week away from the people who I have found to be quite lovely. And in that moment I suppose I was utterly enraged at the fact that I wouldn't get to see them again. That my life would be cut short before I got to say the things I wanted to say, do the things I wanted to do, experience all the things I hadn't yet - and that these people were intrinsically linked to all those things. In a very real way, that incident taught me that life is too short not to love - especially when it could get a hell of a lot shorter at any time.

AND NOW FOR THE PUNCHLINE.

So we were sitting there on the side of the road, huddled up like penguins. Concussion had set in and my eye was searing agony from the airbag. We were quite sorry for ourselves, and as we waited for the back-up van to come and get us, a car came along the road. Traffic was having a difficult time getting around us, the lane was taken up by the van and the dead horse, so they were only able to use one lane. This car tried to get past at the same time as another car, and they ended up facing each other - so this car, driven by someone who clearly was very impatient, attempts to drive over the top of the dead horse.
Over the TOP.
Of a DEAD HORSE.
And as my little sister burst into tears at this supreme act of idiocy, the car gets stuck on the horse and is unable to reverse off or carry on. The wheels spin and the motor roars, but the car is stuck fast, a breached ship on an iceberg.
STUCK ON TOP OF A DEAD HORSE.
So five burly Fijian women get out of the back and start to push the car off the horse in their floral print dresses, and this was about the point where I fell over laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. It may have been delirium from the adreneline and concussion, but I don't think I've seen anything so funny in all my life.