A girl gets on the bus and pauses at the front to rummage in her purse for a token. She’s got brightly colored clips in her hair, a denim vest studded with shining buttons, and short shorts that reveal a muscular brown thigh and calf. But that’s not why Bucky suddenly finds himself staring.

He’s looking at the other leg.

The bottom section looks like a piston, one thin metal bar sliding into a mechanism whose workings seem to be mostly hidden where the prosthetic disappears into the girl’s boot. The top is larger, and above the knee joint, there’s a large cylindrical casing almost the volume of the girl’s other thigh. The casing is painted, covered entirely with an astonishingly vivid range of blues, violets, turquoises, sea-greens, creams, and golds. Somewhere in the back of his mind, his memory spits out the name Claude Monet, and water lilies, and an image of a blond-haired boy standing beside him, mouth open in wonder.