This is a picture I did not take

of the kind of quiet you might call eerie, a morning's dull calm, traffic paused and fuming at a red light, sun just up over my shoulder while I walk across the intersection as a low-slung Chevy comes toward me blazing, its passenger door sprung-open in the way a fist connects and pops a jaw, but odder still, a woman, an adult human woman tumbling out the flung door onto the street as if discarded, making a kind of attempt to roll away so the rear wheels don't come close; her face (the real reason I'm writing this) her face which I've been seeing for three days straight, completely focused on the task, not gritting her teeth, not wincing: surviving, knowing she needs to get out and away from the driver at This Moment Right Now, right then, her bare feet somehow tumbling beneath her as she rolled off her shoulder and her back as my hands lifted above my head and I shouted at the driver who peeled through the intersection taking a wide left-hand turn, the door now a broken wing stuck akimbo, as he threaded his way through other cars, no one honking, no one stopping, no one yelling, because this is the kind of business in which we don't get involved because you never know; and as she rose to her feet with one hand still on the pavement, like a sprinter before a pistol, she began running in a way that made it look like she'd always been running, at top speed, in only her underwear, running as fast as I've ever seen anyone run, in bare feet running away from me, away from the car careening through the intersection, her speed and her bra, her hand around a cellphone, all now disappearing past the corner of the canary-yellow brick building that no one's paid attention to in years and is suddenly now there, now noticeable.