No bus shelter. No little shops. There were the steps going up to Hammarskjöld Plaza, where a few late lunchers were still sitting with their brown bags, but the ghost-woman hadn’t come from there, either. The fact was this: when Trudy Damascus put her sneaker-clad left foot up on the curb, the sidewalk directly ahead of her was completely empty. As she shifted her weight preparatory to lifting her right foot up from the street, a woman appeared.

For just a moment, Trudy could see Second Avenue through her, and something else, as well, something that looked like the mouth of a cave. Then that was gone and the woman was solidifying. It probably took only a second or two, that was Trudy’s estimate; she would later think of that old saying If you blinked you missed it and wish she had blinked. Because it wasn’t just the materialization.

The black lady grew legs right in front of Trudy Damascus’s eyes.

That’s right; grew legs.

There was nothing wrong with Trudy’s powers of observation, and she would later tell people (fewer and fewer of whom wanted to listen) that every detail of that brief encounter was imprinted on her memory like a tattoo. The apparition was a little over four feet tall. That was a bit on the stumpy side for an ordinary woman, Trudy supposed, but probably not for one who quit at the knees.

The apparition was wearing a white shirt, splattered with either maroon paint or dried blood, and jeans. The jeans were full and round at the thighs, where there were legs inside them, but below the knees they trailed out on the sidewalk like the shed skins of weird blue snakes. Then, suddenly, they plumped up. Plumped up, the very words sounded insane, but Trudy saw it happen. At the same moment, the woman rose from her nothing-below-the-knee four-feet-four to her all-there height of perhaps five-six or -seven. It was like watching some extraordinary camera trick in a movie, but this was no movie, it was Trudy’s life.

Over her left shoulder the apparition wore a cloth-lined pouch that looked as if it had been woven of reeds. There appeared to be plates or dishes inside it. In her right hand she clutched a faded red bag with a drawstring top. Something with square sides at the bottom, swinging back and forth. Trudy couldn’t make out everything written on the side of the bag, but she thought part of it was MIDTOWN LANES.

Then the woman grabbed Trudy by the arm. “What you got in that bag?” she asked. “You got shoes?”

This caused Trudy to look at the black woman’s feet, and she saw another amazing thing when she did: the African-American woman’s feet were white. As white as her own.

Trudy had heard of people being rendered speechless; now it had happened to her. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth and wouldn’t come down. Still, there was nothing wrong with her eyes. They saw everything. The white feet. More droplets on the black woman’s face, almost certainly dried blood. The smell of sweat, as if materializing on Second Avenue like this had only come as the result of tremendous exertion.