it knocked me off my feet

A Story About the Body

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had
watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and
he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work
was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him
directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions.
One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she
turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like
that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when
he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." the radiance that he
had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered,
very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I
don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines,
and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his
door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it
up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have
swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.

-Robert Haas