Civil Twilight by Susan Dunlap

the far end was wide and I understood the reason.
    Korematsu motioned me to sit.
    I didn’t move. Breathed. Remembered the reactions to the koan when Leo gave a talk on it. A cart maker built a magnificent cart with wheels of one hundred spokes. If you remove the wheels, the axle, the front and back pieces and even the cart bed, what will it be? “One big mess,” a woman said. “A pile of rubble,” a guy added.
    A pile of rubble?
    The door opened and the acrid smell of formaldehyde gushed in. Instinctively, I breathed through my mouth. A metal dolly rolled through the doorway. A cart. If its wheels were stolen and its bed tossed away, what would it be, I wondered. It was an instant before I realized I was just avoiding looking at the oil-skin-like sheet lying on top of something small and flat.
    “You’re sure?” Korematsu asked again.

    “Yes.” But I held my breath and reminded myself that whatever shape the bones and flesh under the cloth were, they were still as much Karen Johnson as they had been.
    He pulled the sheet clear of her face. Despite all my intentions I gasped. She looked like a Salvador Dalí Karen Johnson, like the cart when its wheels and axle and bed had been trampled, run over . . . as she had been. I kept my eyes on her, holding our connection. Her face, that face I had noted looked so good for a woman the age I took her to be, resembled one of those rubber Halloween masks flattened in its cellophane bag. But it wasn’t all flat, really, just the lower half, like someone had ripped off her jawbone the way you’d tear into the wings of fried chicken. Lucky there was enough lip to cover the exposed bone of her upper jaw because her teeth were gone. That must have been one of them in the box I looked through, swept up off the freeway like debris. A big mess. Her eyes were closed, the lids sunk into her skull and I couldn’t bring myself to consider whether her eyeballs had been knocked loose, were still in the sockets or not.
    My hands went clammy, my head throbbed. The stench of formaldehyde filled the air. I wanted to race out of the room. I wanted to keep staring at her eyelids that looked almost normal, at her hair that someone had smoothed down over her forehead. I wanted to pretend the cart was still a cart.
    I forced my gaze down. The sheet covered her torso as if she’d sat up in bed and pulled it up under her arms. But I could see her clothes had been cut off or maybe there wasn’t anything left of them except for a piece of blue linen jammed so deeply into the flesh of her arm that it mustn’t have been worth cutting out. Her blouse had been a shell—sleeveless—so that meant it had ripped open as vehicles hit her, flapped against her arm and been ground in. I pointed to it and Korematsu nodded. “Maybe there’s a thread caught inside John’s car,” I said.

    He nodded again, but I had the sense he’d swallowed a comment, probably about the police lab figuring that out without my guidance.
    “You haven’t done an autopsy. There’s no incision.”
    “Not yet. The M.E.’s backed up.”
    “Did they do toxicology? Drugs’d explain a lot.”
    He nodded. He was humoring me, answering questions he’d normally remind me were police business, not mine.
    I looked back at her face—half almost normal, half destroyed—and tried to find an answer to this. Common sense said there must have been a desperation in her that I missed. But, even now, even staring at her corpse, I couldn’t reconstruct that. Excitement, yes. Recklessness, even. She had been about to step off the hundred-foot pole and was ready to go, not preparing to be herded into a fall.
    But none of that was reflected in her body. Right now, I wasn’t going to find anything of any use to Karen Johnson or Korematsu. What I needed to do here was for myself. I reached down to touch her hand.
    “Omigod! Her hands! They’re shredded!”
    “That kind of accident . . . hard on appendages.”
    “You don’t mean she