Harvey
an excerpt

Crunch.

Millions of cars perish along the side of the highway every year. If you left them there, in their places of death, at the crash sites, the commuters would find themselves driving down wreck-lined roads. What a mess, and what a society, to use for its main source of transportation such volatile creatures in whose hands you can never safely trust your life. Car crashes are undiscriminating. They take the good and bad, the old and young, the stupid and the intelligent, the good looking and the ugly…and they took Harvey.

Whether Harvey deserved his fate or not is not for us to judge. There are a large number of people who play roles in Harvey’s life who would be inclined to say that indeed the asshole did deserve it. However, that is not by any means the point of this story. The point is to consider not the car crash, but what happened to him afterward.

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They wanted him to go. They wanted him to stay. It was too much to take, so he drove off and away from the city. It was night when he left, dim and grungy city night, not totally dark but all in a gloomy fog of light pollution. He drove through the streets, not noticing the crowds, and not noticing when they started to filter away and not noticing when finally they ended, as he rolled past the city limits at 55 miles per hour.

He mechanically drove himself out onto the lonely, deserted highway. But he was getting less and less aware of what he was doing, where he was driving. He was falling asleep.