[Julie Steiner]

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us.

I live within earshot of an awkward corner that used to send speeders airborne and into our neighborhood's electrical panel every few years. Screech, thump, lights out for several hundred households. The power company finally moved it, thank goodness. Now we just hear the screeches. When there used to be a bump, neighbors would call 9-1-1 and then hurry over to offer help, since we knew where the crash was.

I appreciate that the narrator is probably sketching a sort of self-portrait while imagining the wayward driver, because sometimes empathy works most strongly that way; but statistically speaking, that driver is most likely to be a teenager, or at least under the age of twenty-five. (They always were, in my neighborhood.) Perhaps "a promising student-athlete" or similar could be added to the list of possibilities, before the super-specific stuff kicks in. Injuries from a car accident might well end an athletic career, not just a reputation.

I'm not quite sure of the syntactical relationship between "regret before-and-aftering" to the comma-separated series before it, but since it doesn't seem to be part of that series, you might consider breaking it off from that somehow.