Night Driving

200-word fiction

He knows the road.

It’s mapped out in his mind.

Years of looped commutes, short cuts, detours, and stopovers.

There was a time he could have driven it with one hand, blindfolded, and stayed on course, but since his break the map is a minefield.

Scattered with doubt and sinkholes and wayward pedestrians dead set on making him a murderer.

His fingers clutch the wheel, the muscles in his neck constrict, pinching off vital transit lines to his brain. Only the darkest and most brutal scenarios unfold.

His eyes are tricksters. Show him turns that shapeshift into barricades. Horizon that twists into a row of animated billboards, pulling his focus.

His heart rams against his sternum out of time with the pulsing vein in his temple.

What was that?

A skipped beat?

A missed point of entry for his blood, now oversaturated with fuel for his fantasies. They feed each other. End over end, ass over elbows, until he’s tied up. Asphyxiated by his own mind.

His body is free, but he doesn’t believe it.

Can’t trust it.

The  headlights  flicker  and  

his   breath  goes  

         r a g g e d. 

He  reaches  forward  

to adjust       the lights,   

but  the    hands 

     are 
 
            no      longer         

                                  his.

Photo by Luís Sousa on Unsplash