Today, my family went to my cousin's house to make offerings to our ancestors for the 15th day of the 7th month. When we left their home at about 9.30 pm and walked back to the car, we found the entire sheet of glass of our back window cracked, but not shattered - yet. The pattern of the cracks was so uniform that my parents initially didn't believe my brothers and I and thought it was droplets of rain.

Kenneth ran his hand over the glass and said it was smooth.

I panicked and said I swear it's all going to rain down upon us if we drive (that's how it always is when a back window is cracked in the movies, and that was the image playing over and over in my mind). But my dad said no, it'll hold. He was strangely calm about it all. Maybe he was just thinking about things like whether the insurance was going to cover it and how on earth this could have happened.

My mum's theory is that someone smashed it. But Ken argued that since the cracks are so uniform, that can't be true. And if someone wanted to smash our car, why not continue until all the glass shattered? And the most important thing is, when we got into the car, my curiosity-is-more-powerful-than-injury brother touched the glass on the inside. It's cracked from the inside, he announced.

As the idea that someone broke into our car and hit our back window from the inside is highly unlikely, I can only conclude that it was the change in temperature or something. But that doesn't seem probable either because tonight was neither a particularly hot or cold night. Kenneth's theory is that since our car was originally parked outside and then moved into the car park a while later, the temperature change caused this to happen. But it still seems like an unsatisfactory theory to me.

The ten-minute ride home terrified me. As we drove, the glass creaked. I kept staring at the corners of the window, feeling that the bits at the corners would give way first. None of us in the back seat dared lean backwards. But luckily, my image of glass shards pelting us did not come true. The sheet held itself together. My dad drove in silence, but I could feel the extra care he was taking at corners and humps. As we passed the street lights, the shadows of the back window painted the cracks on my brother's backs. It really looked like rain drops. A haunting sight.

When we got home, we examined the glass again. The cracks on the left side seemed to be more spaced out, but I don't know if it was already like that before we started driving. Once we were upstairs, my dad checked the car insurance. Turns out we're covered, but still have to pay a small fraction of the repairing costs.

I'd been in a bad mood the whole day, and this weird incident just tops it all off. The lack of any theories to explain it just makes me feel so 毛骨悚然. I wonder if my dad kept quiet because his brain was working overtime, or because he has a few theories about what happened.

I really don't know if someone tried to smash our window. All I know is that it seems rather unfair to be shelling out money when we don't even know how this happened. But I suppose that's life.