The Street of the Dead Fetuses

by William Gairdner

...All at once you step on something soft. You feel it with your foot. Even through your shoe you have the sense of something unusual, something marked by a special `give.' It is a foreignness upon the pavement. Instinct pulls your foot away in an awkward little movement. You look down and see...a tiny naked body, its arms and legs flung apart, its head thrown back, its mouth agape, its face serious. A bird, you think, fallen from its nest. But there is no nest here on 73rd Street, no bird so big. It is rubber, then. A model, a...joke. Yes, that's it, a joke. And you bend to see. Because you must. And it is no joke. Such a gray softness can be but one thing. It is a baby, and dead. You cover your mouth, your eyes. You are fixed. Horror has found its chink and crawled in, and you will never be the same as you were...