Then she bent to take off her jeans, and I noticed the winnow of her legs, her shrunken ass, and felt a deep, familiar fear. Of my helplessness, and hers. I thought of so many stories I’d grown up hearing, messages from the world, cautionary tales about unaccompanied women, women without men. Women walking and running along isolated paths; road tripping women, pulled over for a pee at the wrong truck stop. Women with lives, women who forgot there were conditions to how they should be lived. Stories like that always ended in death.
