Drive-by (freewrite)

The darkened man didn't even notice the car burst out of the darkness and into his path. It startled him, which was only natural, but it startled the driver even more. For the man could've sworn that not a moment ago, there had been no one in his path. No dark silhouette approaching the crossing, which was precisely why he'd sped up.
As he scrambled out of the car, the startled man noticed something strange. The front wheel beside his door appeared to be growing smaller, somehow, and he realized, with increasing dismay that the tire was busted.
Just his luck to hit both a man and a splinter at the same time, he thought. He fought to push this voice to the front of his head, for there were other, stranger voices lurking in the back. With no car, he couldn't get away, so he was pretty much tied to the crime scene. Somebody must've seen. Pretty soon, the police would arrive. And then...
They would find absolutely nothing, for when he looked down, at the hood of his car, he found a dent shaped much like a man, but no trace of the man who'd left it.
He crouched and peeked under the car, ready to spill his breakfast over at the first sign of gruesome. But there was nothing of the sort. The car looked precisely like it had looked that morning, when he'd left the driveway, muttering under his breath and clearly not turning back to blow Maureen a kiss.
It had been their ritual, for over ten years, that whenever they fought, they'd always blow each other a kiss. Not kiss properly though, but it had always seemed to them that blowing a kiss showed their feelings perfectly.
A sort of funny way of saying 'although I'm far away from you now, I still love you'.
In that moment, in the yard, in the morning, in the bright sunlight, Alex had not loved Maureen. And it was a feeling that had been growing within him for a while, an increasing suspicion that the last ten years of his life had been nothing but a sham and any moment, he would wake up to the sound of the alarm clock only to find a boy standing in the shoes of a man.

But in life, 'it was all a dream' is rarely the case as that morning's latest match had proved. If he was to wake up, it would've been then, as Maureen stood in front of him in their kitchen and yelled those horrible things at him.
You wake up when you're at your most terrified, they say, and Alex had been broken with fear in those minutes. Fear that he'd thrown his life down the drain and that he'd been loving a ghost. Fear that what Maureen was telling him was indeed real, that the lover in the hills was not a fiction of her imagination. Most of all, though, he was sad. Sad that the happiness he was promised had been served cold and stale.
Yet, he was still here, so it must not be a dream. Just like the missing man he'd hit with his car was not a dream. He saw him and more importantly, he heard the heavy thump as his car drove into the darkened man. Look here, he'd left a considerable dent.
And although he didn't want to admit it, not even to himself, what Alex was feeling at that particular moment was not fear or sadness, it was an overwhelming sense of relief.
Relief that although he'd done it, he'd somehow murdered a man – for there was little chance, it seemed, that someone would survive such a crash – he was getting away scot-free. Without thinking too much of it, he went round back and changed the slashed tire. It was indeed slashed, he noticed as he put it in his trunk, which was most strange.
But it didn't matter. It was all a dream, baby, he told himself, as he got in his car and drove.
He drove for miles, with no sleep or food and by the time Maureen realized her husband was gone, he was halfway across the world, existing in another dream.

And somewhere, on the brink of reality and wakefulness, in the realm of possibility, the darkened man walked the Earth in his true form, smiling. At least he'd done something right.

Today's prompt was 'drive' and this was what it brought forth. Hope you enjoyed. Check out @mariannewest to join our amazing freewriting community!

Thank you for reading,