Suburban Median

By Myna Chang

We see the body on the way to drop our kids off at school. It’s in the median at the Parkway stoplight. We don’t recognize what it is, at first. Understanding comes in pieces: leg, arm, slender foot. Naked, of course.

We try to look away. But is it someone we know? Nestled there in the ragweed and road debris, snarled hair hiding her face.

We gather over coffee. Talk about what we saw, how we tried to protect our children from it. Close your eyes, baby. Blood pounding in our ears.

One of us admits her husband looked, driving past, looked and kept looking. His breath ragged. She doesn’t say any more, but we know. He liked it. That helpless curve of hip.

We expect the authorities to remove the body. Cover her with a blanket. Gentle the evidence from under her nails. But when we go pick our kids up, she’s still there. No police cars, no crime scene tape.

We steel our nerves. We go to the station. We file a report. We demand: Didn’t you see? Who was she? Who did this to her? We hope for help.

The police officers raise their eyebrows, say there’s no body. Maybe it was a trick of the light, they say, or a dead deer. Maybe you imagined it.

No, we say, we didn’t imagine a dead body in the median! It wasn’t an animal, it was a woman!

The men shrug. I don’t know what to tell you.

We still see her. The bend of her back. Tangle of limbs. Faceless. It could be any of us. We think it might be all of us.

Myna Chang (she/her) is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books). Her writing has been selected for Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton), Best Small Fictions, and CRAFT. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. She hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series. Find her at MynaChang.com, or on Twitter or Bluesky at @MynaChang.

Image credit: R. Nial Bradshaw via a Creative Commons license.

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