To the left of my boyfriend's apartment building is a church. I walk by most mornings in a sleepy haze, shielding myself from the biting 7am winds and willing the sky to fall in so I don't have to got to work.
Today I was jarred out of my usual angry morning mood by the sight of chalk outlines of bodies on the sidewalk outside the church doors.

Was there some sort of mass murder out here? The bodies were all very small sillouettes. A child massacre?

After further inspection, I realized they were just a product of children having fun with colored sidewalk chalk. All these morbid looking chalk outlines in various poses. They each had the child's name written in nice careful handwriting along the torso. Meaning some adult supervisor had endorsed this chalk outlining as appropriate, and helped make it all happen.

At first I had thought perhaps some kid from the "bad side of town" had shared with the other children the images he sees outside the mini mart near his house--gang shootings resulting in real chalk outlines. "Hey Billy!" he would shout, "We should do what the policeman does!" Commence outlining.

But no, it seems this was an adult induced idea, given the naming of each child's torso, to show who's silloutte was who's. "Danny died of a gunshot," or "Lindsey was pushed out a window and landed with her leg twisted just so." Horrible deaths given real names...

What if we did that with real chalk outlines?

Anyway it was pretty intense and shook me up a bit. My brain wasn't quite prepared to see so many dead bodies strewn all over the sidewalk at 7am.