It is night. It is not late. It is still early enough for pedestrians to feel safe out on the street. Of course, they are not safe if the night is dark and the street has no sidewalk. There are many dangers for pedestrians in these circumstances.

 You might be driving home from work. Your mind might still be at your desk or you might be thinking about the home which awaits you. Perhaps this small gap in your life, between home and work, between these two lives of yours, is a place of private refuge. It is the only time of the day you are alone. Your body settles into the curves of the car seat. You relax. You drive loose-limbed, one-handed.

 Or maybe you are a stranger. The street is new to you but you are confident. You are following directions others have given you and anyway, you know you have plenty of time to get lost and find your way. You relax. You drive loose-limbed, one-handed. You switch on the radio. Occasionally a clause, in words or music, invades your wandering thoughts, steering them this way or that.

 You might, of course, already be lost, uncomfortably lost. Anxiety has begun to twitch at your scalp, plucking at hairs. Your body has straightened, your shoulders stiffened. You drive with both hands on the wheel, elbows locked. You are alert, watching, waiting for a sign or a landmark. The sign, you anticipate, will tell you where you are and then you will feel your confusion lift, suddenly, like fog.

 Or maybe you aren’t lost and you aren’t going home and you aren’t following directions but there is some other reason you are driving through this stretch of forest, right now, tonight, on the edge of this town, in this state, at this very moment. Maybe no one knows you are here and maybe only you know why.

 The road is unthreatening. It is thickly wooded with occasional gateways leading to isolated houses. The road is familiar, because you travel here daily or sometimes or because you have travelled many like it.
 Maybe you take the corner a little too wide or drive a little too close to the forest’s turfy edge. Or maybe the pedestrian is out in the road too far. Afterwards you will have days, weeks, months, years to examine and re-examine the precise dynamics of the event. But the fact is that you have turned a corner and, instead of the dark road stretching ahead of you, there is a pedestrian. He is in front of your car.

 The running man is lit freakishly by your headlights and he appears in them as suddenly and shockingly as a ghost. He is wearing running shorts and running shoes and probably he was already running, running when your engine idled at the downtown traffic lights, running when you felt the city’s solidity disintegrate into suburban spaces and shadows, running when you turned into this forest road, and he is still running. But right now he is running to get out of the path of your car.

 The headlights seem to trap him and the brief paces he has time to take are strangely towards your fender. In that second you notice, of all things, his elbows. They are working like big pistons to carry his body out of your path. And, you see his prominent jaw bone, made more prominent because he is gritting his teeth, pointing his jaw in the direction of safety at the side of the road. But he cannot avoid the car and you have no time to avoid him either. Your right leg careens like a mad horse onto the unyielding brake but you already know it is too late. There is going to be an impact. For a part of a part of a second, it seems to you that this impact, its sheer inevitability, is something which you have been steering towards all your life. For your whole life you have been hurtling decisively but probably unknowingly on a collision course. Now you know. Here is the collision.

 You grip the wheel in both hands and brace yourself against your seatback.

 The man’s body shoots onto the hood of the car, head first so that his face rushes towards yours for a split second and in that terrible moment your eyes meet. His are wide with terror. In his you see the knowledge of his imminent death. And you know, too, that you are going to kill this man. He is about to be killed by you. You look at each other in fear and horror.

 Maybe your reason for coming to the forest had something to do with this man. Maybe you knew he was going to be here. Maybe you had already decided what was going to happen tonight. Even so, what you feel now is the same fear and horror of the driver who was innocent of all intention. Terror, it’s the same for everyone, the guilty and the innocent.

 And then the man’s head collides with the hood of the car, just in front of the windshield. Behind him you see his legs fly up like some flimsy fabric caught by the wind, say, a child’s kite or washing on a line.

 There is a moment which is lyrically gymnastic, when the man seems to be poised on his head on the hood in front of you. All the time you are braking. There is a screaming noise in your ears, the scream of the brakes, the scream of the man, your own screams, the radio, afterwards you will have a lifetime in which to wonder who was making all that noise.

 Then, when the car still hasn’t stopped but has made a significant contribution towards stopping, the man’s body is flung far ahead of you. You know it must be moving very fast but it seems to fly in slow motion. The feet and legs are still high in the air. They must be held there by a supernatural wind, there can be no other reason for this man to remain feet uppermost as his body travels, headlong, head first, in a graceful trajectory towards the earth.

 Does the body land at the same moment the car stops? It would be a fitting end to the hideous but curiously balletic syncopation between driver and victim. At any rate, there is silence now, the deepest of silences.

 You might get out of the car to examine the man’s condition, call the emergency services, and generally play the good citizen. You know that this action and all subsequent exemplary behaviour can never change what happened in the space of a few seconds tonight on this dark road but you could do it anyway.

 Or you might not get out of the car. You might instead remain tightly locked in your warm cell. By staying inside the car you minimise any evidence of your involvement in the event and you can minimise it still further by, for example, going to the car wash. A cursory glance at the hood tells you there are no dents immediately visible, at least through the windshield. If there really are no dents and you never take this road again, how is anyone investigating the death to associate you with it? You can drive on now and no one will ever know.