Mannequin: Chapter 1.1 – “Ceiling”

It all started on the day I died.

I woke up that morning to the wail of sirens, as I had for the last six months.  Lee Barker Memorial, the oldest functioning hospital in the state, spanned three city blocks and serviced tens of thousands of patients annually within its weathered granite walls.  A relic of grandeur in a city that had been dancing on the edge of disrepair for decades, the hospital stood as a testament to human perseverance and ingenuity.  The hospital processed hundreds of cases every day, from an infant’s stubbed toe to a construction worker’s severed arm to the occasional case of lymphangiomatosis or Antley-Bixler Syndrome.

It also happened to be a stone’s throw away from my kitchen window.

I groaned, sat up in bed, and promptly slammed my head on the low ceiling of my “bedroom.”  After six months of living in the cheapest studio apartment I could find, I still couldn’t remember that falling out of bed was actually preferable to suffering a minor concussion every morning.

Twenty years ago, the building was a story taller.  Sometime between now and then, someone thought it would be a good idea to have a romantic, candlelit dinner involving massage oil, incense, and liberal amounts of petroleum jelly.  This had the predictable result of ensuring that the inhabitants were blissfully unaware when a gentle breeze tipped over an ill-placed candle.  Rumor has it that the offenders survived only because they were able to greasily wiggle  through a stuck window onto the fire escape.

At any rate, the landlord decided it would be cheaper to erect a new roof instead of rebuild an entire collapsed floor.  The result was an odd, slanted number that started out even and tapered gradually to become a wall.  Take a cross-section of my apartment, and you wind up with half of an isosceles trapezoid.  My bed is wedged at the point where the ceiling meets the floor, not due to choice, but because it would double as the centerpiece of the apartment anywhere else.

I groaned again for good measure, and shuffled blearily across the cold tile floor in search for nourishment.

I was halfway through a stale croissant when my world shattered.

Mannequin: Prologue – “Something Missing”

She was nearly complete.

I couldn’t remember when I had stopped referring to her as “it.”  When had she so completely enthralled me, thwarting my senses and sensibility alike?  I had been so careful.  When had she become more than an object, more than a mere sum of her parts?  When had she become my masterpiece?

Looking back, it was all but inevitable.  I knew full well how abominable my task might become when I first started on her.  Perhaps if I had not kept her hidden for so many years, those closest to me would have had a chance to save me, before she had consumed what remained of my sanity.

It was too late for that, now.  I could not be redeemed.  I did not want to be redeemed.

And yet, looking at her now, lying there with a glow that only my gentle, caressing hands could give her, I felt something missing.  Something gone, or something that never was.  One last shred kept her from true perfection.

Eyes.  She needed eyes.  Eyes full of passion, full of intelligence.  Eyes as deep as the ocean and as clear as the night sky.  I needed eyes to give her life.

I felt a slow smile creep across my face.  Eyes.  I knew exactly where to find them.