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“What?”
“The rock. But it’s all snowed. Snowy.”
“I don’t understand, ma’am?” the sergeant said.
Her head was heavy. She closed her eye.
“Ma’am?”
There was a loud crackle of the radio, a beep, fuzzy words.
So tired, just so cold and so tired.
“You have a blanket we can use?” the sergeant asked the neighbors. “We need to get her out of this wet stuff, warm her up. There’s some major accidents out there. And with the surge, everyone’s short staffed. Ambulance is gonna be a minute.”
“I tried to help her change, she wouldn’t let me.”
“That’s fine. Now we’ll try, all right?”
“We gave her a warm drink there,” the neighbor told him.
“Good. You have any electric blankets, hot-water bottles, that kind of thing?”
“I think we have a hot-water bottle somewhere.”
“Get it. Hot water, but tap hot, not boiling. Don’t want to burn her, yeah?”
“Okay.”
“Let’s get you out of this coat.”
She felt hands on her, fumbling with the coat’s buttons, and their uninvited movement forced her to thrash and kick at the hands pressing on her chest, legs, hips.
“No—no!”
“Calm down, we’re trying to help you, we can’t warm you up with this wet coat on. Ma’am. Calm down.”
She flailed blindly, connected with something soft.
“Shit…just…hold her arms, all right?”
The air crawled down her chest as they unbuttoned her coat. The officers parted the coat wide and then lifted their hands away from her when they saw her naked breasts, stomach, legs, the symmetrical white markings butterflied from groin to belly button. She thrashed, tried to scream, but only gasped again and again.
She saw linoleum. Tried to draw her arms and legs in to protect the soft places.
You ran all this way, you did all that, and it’s happening anyhow. He got you anyway, that’s what this is.
She started to cry, to weep, and the salt stung.
This is a mortuary. White tiled and bright, and you’re on the slab and they’ve scissored open your skin to see what made you stop ticking.
“What—what are you doing?” The woman sounded shocked.
Hands released her, and she was at last able to curl fully into a ball, forehead to knees, lying on her side atop the wide-open coat.
“We’re just trying to help. To get her dry. Get the coat off.”
“Here,” the woman said. “Cover her up, Jesus.” Lightly, worriedly, the woman added, “She’s skin and bones.”
