Not a whole one
I was about 14 I suppose, and I was woken in the night by my mum, who came into my room and said "There's been an accident in the street outside, there are police everywhere." Looking past her, I could see that the front of the house was completely bathed in flickering blue light. However, the thought of going to watch an accident in progress didn't appeal, and I went back to bed and to an uneasy sleep.

The next morning, I found out some of the details of the crash - a car had been reversing out of the drive opposite, sideways on to the road so its lights weren't visible. A motorcyclist had hit it doing 40. Both drivers were fine, but the motorcyclist's passenger had been killed. My mum pointed out that the passenger had only been wearing casual clothes and trainers instead of bike leathers and boots, trying to drive home the importance of wearing protective gear. Little did she or I know how much of a lesson I'd be getting later that day...

...so later that day, after school, I was delivering the free local paper. I'd finished my round and was making my way back up the road. There was still some minor debris from the accident scattered about - a few scraps of police tape, a bit of a broken indicator light, that sort of thing. Then I kicked something with my foot. It rolled a bit. I looked down.

It was a toe. Unprotected by his flimsy trainers, somehow the accident had severed one of the dead man's toes. In the dark, the police and ambulance crews had missed it. Now I'd found it. I think it was a middle toe. It still had little hairs and a nail on it.

I don't think I was sick, but it made me feel very nauseous. I went inside and told my parents, we decided to call the police and let them deal with it. My dad went outside and collected it in a plastic bag, and a copper showed up some time later to take it away. My dad cracked a joke about how they didn't have anything to tie the label onto at the morgue, or something to that effect. I was just so relieved that this gruesome object that had found its way into my life was gone again.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 17:25, Reply)