The Day I Drove Into an Elderly Person
She laughed, the way my grandmother did in the nursing home when she didn’t know who I was.
I drove my burgundy sedan into an elderly woman with a walker as she crossed the road before sunrise. My peripheral vision picked her up a split second before the impact, before reality shifted, before the woman bashed off my car with a jolting thud. I locked down my brakes and skidded, threw it into park in the middle of the road and flew out of the car.
Blood rushed through me as if my heart erupted. It took a second to reach her, but a minute to process what I saw — shades of grey, fluid in the air like memories blurring, washing away against the blackened sky; and the woman, standing uninjured in a rose-colored nightgown with both hands on the walker, not shocked to see me, maybe expecting to. I had just hit her at 30 mph. She was clearly alive, but I wasn’t breathing myself. I inhaled deeply, grounding the vision of the person before me. The sense that I had swallowed an experience and spit it up as something new spread through me. “Miss, are you okay?”
She laughed, the way my grandmother did in the nursing home when she didn’t know who I was. Because life was funny. “Yes, yes, I’m fine.” She turned her head to see me. Her deep glance felt like holding hands. Was she aware of what had just occurred?
“Do you need help?”
“No, no.” She continued crossing the dark residential street, lifting the walker and stepping patiently. I waited there for her to reach the concrete walkway of a white ranch home with a red door.
With the same pace and energy as the woman, empathically, I walked back to my car. My neck beat with life. The Dodge waited for me with its engine running, the door still open. The impact of hitting the woman had ripped the side mirror off the car — tearing its thick plastic outer shell, leaving the base still attached to the car with nuts and bolts, and the mirror hanging from the door by wires: remnants of a former reality.
I turned to see her opening the red door, unharmed. Rather than leaving the mirror bouncing against the car door as I drove, I pulled it inside the window before continuing to the gym. I too was unharmed. I recalled the challenges confronted by my neighbor caring for his mother who had Alzheimer’s. She sometimes left the house quietly after dark, which caused him many sleepless nights. I arrived at the gym at 5:27 AM.
Activity there was normal — Lenny and Jay arguing about the Yankees batting lineup in the weight room, Brenda pulling people into her sculpting class. It was what everyone expected: a collective conscious creation.
Reality was fluid, like an awakened dream state. Creation by will; materialization from within. Anything can change. This knowledge settled inside me. Grandma’s perspective was right: Life was funny.
Philip Matcovsky’s writing is nominated for Best Small Fictions 2026. It features in DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Amethyst Review, Braided Way Magazine, Odyssey Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a lightworker and cosmic traveler based in New York.
