Mark's Pages

August 13, 2003:

Hospital bed, intensive care.

Sad-looking young woman, all tubes and dials and plaster bones, heavy purple bruises under both eyes, forehead stitched with blackening surgical thread.

"How'd it happen?", you ask gingerly.

"Well," she says. Shy smile, flickering glint of painful amusement. "I swerved to avoid a dead animal in the road. I didn't want to kill it any worse."