Author's Note: The legal stuff, of course. Everything created by Jim Henson belongs to Jim Henson. I'm leaning heavily on his creativity. Title is borrowed from a certain Robert Frost poem.

And just go with it for a little while. This is not an instant gratification story. There needs to actually be characters first, you know…

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Prologue

There are things you remember when you are dying, a scatter-shot set of photographs, clear, perfect, that can never be sorted out again. If you are lucky enough to survive dying, or say, rather, that you are lucky enough to have it halted mid-way, you discover that these slivers of sparkling glass memory never fade, never rust, remain clear in your mind.

She remembered starting the car, leaving her apartment and thinking that it was empty. Thinking of how tired she was of it being empty. The sun was setting behind clouds soggy with rain, and the air was slowly turning blue, deep almost-night, like the most perfect silk, with the black skeletons of trees interrupting like lace.

The streetlights glinting off a CD of show-tunes, her favorite ones, the ones she'd always wanted to sing. Moon River. Send in the Clowns. Love is only Love. Remembered thinking with relief that it didn't hurt so much, anymore. The soft curl of music filling her little no-nonsense car, lulling her, like the blue-ing air with it's leafless lace of black, and how that sense of unreality wasn't helped when the rain fell. The lamps in the opposing lane turned to small stars of light in the raindrops on her windshield. The rhythm of her windshield wipers.

Thinking of nothing but going to town and visiting with her parents. The books she'd bought for Toby sitting in the seat beside her. And then reaching the bridge and her headlights catching the rippling mirror of black spreading across the center of the road. Knowing, somehow, before it happened, what would happen, though perhaps that was just an echo of the moment her wheels hit the puddle and kept going.

Thinking as her breaks locked that hydroplaning always sounded like some kind of wonderful watercraft. Something that could fly.

Spinning out over the water, and how it didn't seem real at all. The air was still black-laced blue, lit orange by the street-lamps and falling behind her. And her mind agreed with Barbara Streisand, where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns. Quick. Send them in, as the car hit the water and she watched it sink into the river.

Now she struggled. Now she fought, snapping open her seatbelt, as reality sank its teeth into that blue dreamy-ness. She got it open and could almost get out…could almost get out, her window had shattered and she could almost get out. But the window had shattered because the driver's side of the car hit the river first, and the door had crumpled in on her left arm, pinning it between her seat and the door.

She shouted for help, knowing no one would hear her. Not over their cars. Not over their music and their thoughts. And the water was rushing through her open window, so cold it burned her and made her want to scream.

But I want to live. She thought, and struggled harder. Later, she would learn she struggled so much she nearly fractured the arm caught in the door, but it remained just that. Caught. Like the rest of her.

But I want to live. I want to live.

I wish to live. I wish to live, and I'm going to die within a shout of the highway, and no one is ever going to hear me. And I. Wish. To. LIVE.

And she tried one more time when the water began to creep over her face—such an appropriate word, some part of her mind whispered, and now the world was no longer blue and orange, but black and orange, right before the water reached her eyes. She thought she saw a shape in that black and orange.

And through the water, she thought she heard a shout, a wrenching pain beside her, and then no pain and no more pressure, no more being pinned. She felt hands on her shoulder, pulling her out of the car. She felt air on her face, and rain, and she tried to open her eyes to see who her rescuer was. She knew who he was, but she had to see…

But it was too much. And she was too tired.

Though, she supposed, the sound in the distance meant once again, she'd gotten her wish.

Sirens.

Sarah Williams supposed she would live after all.