In an issue of the National Enquirer or in some similarly crude tabloid I saw a photograph of a heavyset woman who had been struck and killed by a car as she crossed a street in New York City. Her legs had been broken in two, completely severed just above her ankles an inch up into each shin. Her ankles and feet, still tightly laced and shod in hightop shoes, lay three feet away from the stumps of her thick, muscular legs, heavy, thick hips, her body otherwise normal, dressed in a woman's dark suit. The odd lights in the picture I assumed were shards of broken glass illumined by the flashbulb. There was no blood. This made the scene peculiar and strange, the clean geometric break in the two cylinders of her lower legs, the inner circles of bone visible at their centers, as if the woman's legs had been chopped in two by the blade of a guillotine.
I felt nauseated.
For days I could not stop thinking about it.
Broken.
The human body so vulnerable, so fragile, the bone so brittle.
It haunted me.
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