...a stretch of highway that must have been about five kilometres away, maybe less, maybe more. She even wiped the inside of the windshield with a cloth so I could see better. I looked: I saw the headlights of cars. From the way the beams of light were swivelling, there must have been a bend in the highway. And then I saw some green shapes in the desert. Did you see? [she] asked. Yes, lights, I replied. [She] looked at me: her bulging eyes gleamed, as do, no doubt, the eyes of the small mammals native to the inhospitable environs of Gómez Palacio, in the state of Durango. Then I looked again in the direction she had indicated. At first, I couldn’t see anything, only darkness, the sparkling lights of that restaurant or town. Some cars passed and the beams of their headlights carved the space in two.

Their progress was exasperatingly slow, but we were beyond exasperation.

And then I saw how the light, seconds after the car or truck had passed that spot, turned back on itself and hung in the air, a green light that seemed to breathe, alive and aware for a fraction of a second in the middle of the desert, set free, a marine light, moving like the sea but with all the fragility of earth, a green, prodigious, solitary light that must have been produced by something near that curve in the road—a sign, the roof of an abandoned shed, huge sheets of plastic spread on the ground—but that, to us, appeared to be a dream or a miracle, which comes to the same thing in the end.

--from Gómez Palacio; Roberto Bolaño (full story available at The New Yorker)