In the span of about three weeks this month, the news here has read like a casualty list. Four people dead on Chelopeshko Shose after two men raced each other into a city bus at around 150 km/h. Two teenagers killed near Mezdra by a kid with five months of driving experience. Two nine-year-old boys from the Slavia academy and one of their fathers were on the Trakia highway when a truck crossed the median. Another truck punching through the guardrails on the Struma a day later, almost like an encore. These were not freak events scattered across the calendar. They happened practically on top of each other and they happened in summer.

Because the pattern is not a mystery. By the latest preliminary numbers, Bulgaria now has the worst road fatality rate in the whole EU, 71 deaths per million, and we got there without even getting worse. Our rate actually dropped from the year before. Romania’s just dropped faster, so we passed them on the way down and inherited first place. Our own statistics institute will tell you August is the deadliest month of the year. The transport officials have known about the July-to-September spike for over a decade. So this is not a surprise we keep stumbling into, but a season we schedule, then act shocked about when it arrives on time.

What gets me is the mix of things that make it possible. The mentality first, the way summer seems to flip a switch and suddenly twenty-somethings with expensive cars and almost no experience treat public roads like a set from The Purge. Then the infrastructure, the rural roads where more than half our deaths happen, the underinvestment we have been promising to fix since I was in school. And underneath all of it, the impunity. A truck driver with twenty prior penalties is still behind the wheel of a multi-ton vehicle. Two racers already had violations on record before they killed four people. We know exactly who these drivers are, we just never take the keys away in time.

And then autumn comes, the numbers drop and we let ourselves forget. When little Siyana was killed by a truck crossing into oncoming traffic last year, the whole country was in the streets shouting about the war on the roads. Fifteen months later, the Trakia crash was nearly identical and the anger had already evaporated.

The bloodbath is seasonal, and so, it turns out, is our outrage.