On 38th Street near Stark, I often walk by a particular parked car, a beat-up Honda hatchback, and it's got all this junk in the back seat, including a pair of flesh-colored female mannequin legs. I've gone by several times, but somehow I always forget, and the sight of these legs jutting over the passenger seat headrest, in the manner of a wantonly tossed corpse or a passed-out drunken slut, always startles me. I haven't stopped to peer in more carefully, to give the legs some kind of context amid the rest of the backseat debris, as that could possibly mark me as some sort of sick mannequin voyeur or bizarre fetishist of torsoless dummies to somebody who happened to be gazing out his front window at that precise moment. So I breeze on by, very blasé, and then the legs trouble me all the way home. One theory I've been kicking around is that the owner of the car is in fact a would-be serial killer, and he has carefully planted the legs in his car precisely for public consumption. He wants his neighbors to become familiar with the sight of female body parts haphazardly strewn about his car and/or property, so that if someday he slips and a real victim is spotted, the witness will mistakenly assume it's one of his mannequins and move along, unconcerned.

I think my theory is completely reasonable and not the least bit paranoid at all.