The Woman on The Other Side of the Street

I was gently accosted on the street today. There is that moment in city life where you are walking down the street with headphones and global warming has truly and officially taken it's toll. It's 75 degrees in March in Chicago and you just did some day drinking with a friend. On your walk home, which is just a clever attempt to burn off calories and listen to Spotify and "be outside", you meet a woman. 

This woman is horribly disfigured. I want to say she was burned alive in some awful fire, but here was before me. She had been walking ahead of me with some bags and a granny cart and my gait swiftly closed in on her. She must've heard my footsteps. She stopped and turned around and waited for me .

"Can you walk with me?" she said. For some reason I simply answered yes and slowed down as she regaled with the tale of the woman across the street. The woman across the street was also walking and apparently these two had a very heated rivalry for the last 4 minutes. Women across the street had accidentally hit the disfigured woman with her bag while on the bus. When both got off the bus woman across the street punched disfigured woman in the arm. Disfigured women then crossed the street, only to be followed by woman across the street. She then crossed the street again and I suppose that this all happened mere seconds before she met me. Though I did not witness any of it. 

Disfigured woman was probably late 50's and had skin that looked like it had been wrapped too tightly around cotton. Her lip jutted out inches from her face, or more likely where her face used to be. She was nice, but hard to look at. I informed her I was only walking to the grocery store and she said she was too. This seemed weird, why did she need someone to walk her another 100 feet in a public parking lot no less. 

I am not proud of this, but I this point I suspected my companion of being the crazy one. You judge a book by it's cover and this was had been shredded to pieces and reassembled as perfect as possible, but it was a long way from being a normal book. Over the next minute she went through the story 2 or 3 times - motioning at the woman across the street, who never so much as looked in our direction. As we got to the store we were probably both thankful that there were other people around to witness any malfeasance. I told her to have a nice day and she thanked me and left with "safety in numbers."