“That’s mine!” I snapped.

He didn’t bother to reply. Why should he? He was twice as big as I was, propelled by rage. Without any effort he tore the bicycle from my hands, lifted it above his head, and carried it down the sidewalk. I darted after him, shouting incoherent, laughable things about property and rights. A Coca-Cola bottle sailed past my ear. The man stopped, as if he’d found what he was looking for, and hurled my bicycle right into a beautiful plate glass window that had gone untouched until now.

“Oh, you bastard!” I screeched. Glass covered the sidewalk, razor sharp, and my bicycle lay just inside the broken window, in the middle of a display of fine leather goods. Already a man was picking his way inside. Blood streamed down the side of his face and stained his shirt. He bent down, kicked aside my bicycle, and gathered up an armful of pocketbooks.

Well, I wasn’t going to stand for that, was I? That was my damn bicycle. And I had work to do, I had my camera to collect, I had news to report, a whole world waiting for this story! Without a thought, I stepped forward onto that mess of broken glass and bent over the ruined window frame to grab the bent front wheel.

And I think I succeeded. I think I did grab that wheel. I may even have lifted it a foot or two. But the victory was a Pyrrhic one, I’m afraid, because in my haste and fury and determination, I hadn’t given due attention to the glass remaining in the frame. I only noticed the glitter of one transparent shard an instant before it sliced across my forearm. Split my skin clean apart, the way you butterfly a loin of lamb.

I don’t remember feeling any pain. I just stood there staring at the blood as it streamed over my wrist and dripped to the pavement, and thought You are a goddamned idiot, Leonora Randolph. Or maybe someone said that out loud. Because I felt a little dizzy at the sight of that blood, I’m afraid, a little fuzzy at the edges, and if good old Veryl hadn’t come out of nowhere and grabbed me right there, grabbed me and yelled at me and smacked some wad of material—her apron, as it turned out—into my wound, I might just have fainted.

Come to think of it, maybe that was Veryl’s voice, shouting inside my head. Veryl’s voice saying, You are a goddamned idiot, Lenora Randolph. And you know what? She was right.

The glass missed that artery in my wrist, the one that’s supposed to bleed out when you slice it. Thank goodness, said the doctor at the hospital who stitched it up, nice-looking fellow. The nurse wound the gauze over his handiwork and thanked goodness also. Thank goodness, you might have been killed out there. Then they sent me in a wheelchair to a private room to stay for a night or two, just to keep an eye on me. I can’t imagine why.