Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

One day the body of a beautiful naked woman appeared. She was dead or, at least, it can be said she had not the animation of life. And her body contorted as it floated and wove through the air as if it were caught of the very tip of a coddling breeze.

She was so fantastically beautiful that, at first, many thought she not real. Something this perfect, something this sexual had to be a construct. A thing made by man.

Her body first appeared in the desert. This, of course, emboldened the religious as they surmised that she must surely be heaven-sent. A broken and lost angel and they pondered and they fought over just what her message might be.

But then, as the curve of her breasts and the mound of her sex was giggled at by children, as her nudity consumed the minds of the masses, as she appeared on t-shirts and as she became the silent spokeswoman for a car insurance company and as her image was redacted and then banned from billboards, the barest mention of her became well, it became quite suddenly obscene.

But still her gentle ballet traversed the globe entire, the folded back tips of her toes did drag through the sand and the flay of her long limbs conducted the snow. She closed down major highways and curled gracefully through the driving rain, on and on and on and into the years.

Sometimes she’d elevate high up into the air and then spin and drift and plunge down into the sea. It is here, away from eyes that can only think to judge and condemn beneath the waves, alongside creatures and plants that moved as she, it is here, she revealed just what it was that she was.

Scientists were the first to cut her. Initially, it was solitary strands of her hair that were plucked and the tiniest of cellular samples ripped away from her core. And then came the collectors, the hoarders, those hungry for souvenirs and soon her beautiful hair became hacked right down to the scalp.

They shot her. Nobody knows who. But it’s thought it was kids that put that tiny singed hole in her chest and the huge smoking cavern in her back.

People had bored of her dance, they wanted more. They wanted revelation but it never came. So they picked and they prodded at her seams till she broke. And she did.

Sometimes pieces of her come up at auction. There’s a guy in Hong Kong that owns a near completely intact left leg. They’re really sought after and there’s even talk now of gathering them all up and trying to piece her back together. They can do that sort of thing, I’m told.

And maybe then we’ll know, maybe then we’ll know just what it was she was for.