And who, then, had really taken her? A man she had held her hand out to,
one day, in the canned goods aisle at Safeway? Or these strangers who
ingested her without guessing how hands, pressed deep into cottony
pockets, smell thick and bitter as creosote from her aunt's licorice candies?
Or, perhaps, the very ones she'd abandoned in the grocery store, the ones
who had later given her photograph up to the casual disregard of strangers?

Worse, still, were the badly copied posters, run off on ditto machines, in
which the same photograph, cropped to a head shot, was accompanied by
a list of nouns, like jeans and tee-shirt and sweater and shoes, in which her
body had become a series of attributes like scarred and hazel and brown
and white. In the posters, G was almost always last seen wearing...though
sometimes, G could be described as...

No. Old mistakes would not be repeated. It was not enough to vanish her
body and slowly reconstruct an other life from the outside-in. The change
would have to begin here, now, as G made herself utterly unknown to those
around her. She would not vanish so much as slowly dissipate, from the
inside-out. Though her physical removal might be noted, she doubted, by
that time, anyone would care. She would see to it that her absence would
go unquestioned, in much the same way no one would question the act of
mopping up spilt milk from the kitchen floor. G would vanish, and her
ascension would have the same characteristic of unquestionable logic. If
asked about her disappearance, those who now loved her would stare in
incomprehension at their interrogator, as if to say, yes, the vase was broken.
Yes, I suppose someone removed the debris. Yes, perhaps I swept up the
wreckage. I don't remember. Eyes narrowing to ask, And why on earth
would you leave shards of broken glass underfoot?