Morning Coffee and the New York Post

All that was left of the scene when I stepped out to get my wife a capuccino this morning was a pair of flat, beige women's shoes, a few discarded royal blue heavy latex gloves, a contractor's dump truck parked in the middle of the street and bits of human fleshy detritus lingering about a good-sized pool of bright red blood which had seeped out a bit like strands of a web into the surrounding cracks in the pavement. The shoes were a sort of mule, flat soled with a kind of fake braid in the front and heel straps in the back, the heel strap on the right shoe broken near the side buckle. The sort of shoe I would imagine an older Puerto Rican or Polish woman with heavy ankles and a broad skirt might have bought at a Payless. The Hasids huddled in little groups mumbling, the Puerto Ricans in looser packs, speaking in loud, slurred Spanish making Gareth-like hand gesticulations, Police detectives inspecting the axles.
There are so many obvious things to question at a moment like that. Perhaps the most obvious being the most obvious: why did they leave her shoes?