Night Driving

by Elizabeth Hyde

He shouldn’t have been allowed to drive that long stretch of highway alone, surrounded by nothing but an empty darkness; they shouldn’t have let it happen. He turned up the radio until the sound of it blotted out his own breathing, until the music almost hurt him. The speakers shook and he sang out loud, and it felt as if, for a moment, there was nothing between him and the vacant night, as if this sound was all there was. He shouted and yelled with a manic sort of misery. Because suddenly there was something glorious about the ache inside him that wouldn’t go away. And he turned up the music even louder and closed his eyes, his foot poised to slam the accelerator all the way to the floor, just to feel himself shoot forward into nothing with nothing and no one to hold him back.

6S

Elizabeth Hyde writes all sorts of things, but she has a particular fondness for the sad and the strange. She keeps forgetting she has a diploma for an English degree under her bed.