Once I saw the chalk figure I couldn’t get enough of it. I kept coming back and walking slower and slower around it, measuring how far it was from the police barricade and from where I stood looking down at it, sprawled where we left him. But I figured out a way to keep looking at it and not step in the garbage scattered nearby. You know, leaves, rags, torn newspapers, bits of dog hair, blood maybe, and lots more leaves. I went three steps this way and three steps that way, keeping the chalk outline in sight and missing the garbage and dogshit. One-two-three, one-two-three. Up-two-three, down-two-three. When I saw one of the neighbors watching from a window, I cut out of there. By then I knew what I had to do.

I came back that night. The chalk shape was glowing like crushed jewels under the streetlights. I took off my shirt and pants and didn’t even feel cold. I crossed the barricade and sat inside the chalk. The glow was on me now. It was me. I lay down in the shape of the dead man, fitting my head, arms, and legs in place. I was warm all over.

The police came and got me up. Their voices were soft and mine was soft. They pulled a white jacket over me like some old lady’s shawl. I shrugged a little to get it off, but my arms wouldn’t move. When I looked for my hands, I couldn’t find them. The police didn’t ask many questions, and I didn’t say nothing the whole time. At the precinct, a doctor talked to me real quiet-like and said the leaves would go away forever if I told him everything that happened to the dead man and to me. But they didn’t call him Metro, they called him some other name with an accent in it. A name I didn’t even know. I asked the doctor again about the red leaves. He promised they would go away. “What about the blood?” I asked. “Will I step in the blood?”

“Not if you come clean,” he said.

“What about my sneaks?” I asked him. “Will they get dirty?”

PART TWO

PART TWO

Ruella

Ruella

I wasn’t even out of my building yet, and there I was rushing to a job. Then it hit me how I hated taking the subway. I hated all the darkness and the smell of burning electricity and the speed rattling loud at my head. I didn’t want to be that close to all those people. Falling into step with folks I didn’t even know. Everybody going somewhere. Fast-stepping when the music was only a waltz. Where was Fred Astaire when you needed him?