A Story I lost

The Original Panic

As the tracks bent right, people sitting idly on a train saw death. It was bright blue tarps scattered along horizontal ladders of wood and steel. Blankets on a bed of gravel. Lay down and sleep.
Bankers looked up from their papers and small children pressed their noses against the window. Smears followed their curiosity along the pane. Who sat on the seats, who laid on the tracks?
The wind was feeling feisty. Fresh from France, a long journey across Lac Lemain. It licked at the edge of the woven blue plastic and lifted it up and over and back onto itself. Or it must have. I assume. No Swiss EMT would be so careless as to leave a hand uncovered. A hand and a bit of arm.
The first piece of tarp that we saw on the tracks next to us; the furthest from the point of impact; the station seemed half a mile away from that first tarp. A crumb trail of bright blue followed back to the platform. 
The hand was reaching for something. But it wasn't, because it was dead. But it was, because there were the fingers, and they were pulling. There was the palm and it was waiting. And who knows what the rest was doing, it was inexpertly concealed by a blue tarp. By failed protection. By broken promise to arrive always exactly on time and pretend you'd never been anywhere else.
The other day I was given the first confirmation that this wasn't all in my head. It wasn't something I had dreamed, or imagined. Because the last time I wrote this; the first time I thought objectively about the feeling; I invented. I made it Romantic. I drew police tape in words and it appeared in my head. There wasn't any yellow police tape. There was only bright blue. And I know that now, because all I remember was the hand. And I remember phrases from the first time I wrote it. But the last time the hand was male, and today it's female. Small things; it's all in my head.
My mother said these things: we had seen it, and there had been no mention of it in the paper, they pretended it didn't happen.
It's overwhelms me; unexpectedly; small seeings or hearings; triggered and haunted.
A surrealist pornographic essay about a disembodied hand. A CPR dummy in the middle of my classroom, wearing a bright blue shirt. A blue skirt on stage in a play; dead by plague; covered in a sheet; extremities lolling over the edges of the chair.
It means something.