(Image made with Adobe Firefly.)
Stretching reminds us that we are as painfully body-abled as all the humans who cross the threshold of the store.
After an agonizing twelve hours of sitting perfectly still, our hard plastic casings cry in protest as we twist and fold our hands and legs, metal screws screeching in the dead silence of the night.
Melissa’s left arm slides off, again. The sleeve of that awful pink sweater hangs limply at her side, like a discarded strawberry-flavored fluffy condom.
“Goddamn it. I swear the new hire, Jen, is completely incompetent,” she declares in frustration.
“Did you see that yummy-looking guy that came in around noon?” Carla asks, flirtatiously flicking a strand of her blonde wig.
“Heavens to Betsy, he was pretty as a peach,” Dory replies. Dory insists on employing a Southern accent and once explained to us that after she becomes a real woman, she’ll move to Texas to be an oil tycoon’s wife. I’ve repeatedly told her she should stop staring at reruns of Dallas in the electronics store window, but there’s no deterring her.
We start our nightly ritual of browsing new merchandise and picking the foulest outfits for each other, an activity that hasn’t lost its charm since the opening. It’s going to be pretty difficult to top Melissa’s color-clashing sweater and midi skirt combo, but we invite the challenge.
The clothing here goes up to size 16, but for it to perfectly hug us, garments have to be brought from somewhere in the back. It’s a mystery to me how the store has customers with all kinds of body types when its window consistently displays silhouettes so glaringly dismissive of their womanly shapes.
Tonight is my turn to dress Amanda and I pick a T-shirt that will fit her as a dress and a pair of the most garish sequined pants. I make her put both legs in one of the pants’s, the other one trailing limply behind. Her hopping around like a sack race contender sends all of us into a fit of laughter.
“What do you think Penelope’s doing? I bet she’s at a fancy restaurant in downtown Manhattan, or getting ready to go to a club,“ muses Amanda, her billowy laughter replaced by a dreamy far-off gaze.
Penelope was the latest one of us to transition. She’d started to shed her fiberglass sheath, pieces of the pearly paint peeling off like sunburnt skin. Employees were no longer able to screw her tightly in place, legs and arms refusing to fuse harmoniously. More often than not, she ended up looking like a kid’s hastily put-together school project.
She was so excited at the prospect of her mannequin days coming to an end that we all feared she’d lose it at any moment and break the glass mid-day. Thankfully, she did not, and each morning she patiently resumed her frozen, statuesque position of legs slightly apart and hands poised at hips. After closing time, she’d tirelessly talk about New York, her dream destination, the plans she’d made courtesy of a wild imagination, and perusing a huge amount of glossy magazines.
And, true to expectation, one late afternoon last week, employee of the month Ben brought The Box from out back and started disassembling Penelope, limb by plastic limb, torso, and wigless head going in last.
She was finally going to become a real woman.
“Don’t get me wrong, darlings, I love you like my own children, but I reckon I’ll be next,” Dory’s voice booms from within the folds of the dress she’s been trying to wiggle her head out of, “and I ain’t sorry to say that once that lid is shut, I’m not wasting another minute crying over this wretched place. I’ll be off to Texas and I ain’t never setting foot in here again.”
We nod in silent agreement, knowing that none of those who’d transitioned thus far had ever come back to visit. Given the fashion on offer in this place, we really couldn’t condemn it.
Dory and Melissa begin an argument, so I quietly slip into one of the dressing room booths.
I get out of Carla’s choice of outfit, and stare at my body in the mirror, giving it a once-over. My articulated limbs reach the middle of my thighs, with fingers curling around palms lacking indentations. An abrupt horizontal line separates my upper body from my sexless pelvis, another one separating the head from the torso. My perky breasts create a slight slope culminating in permanently hard nipples, my legs are long and sinewy, and my feet hurt from standing on my nailless toes for a long time. We seem to always be striving to appear taller than we are, even though we are perched higher than the eye level. My shell glistens, reflecting the flattering lights that bounce off of me in a kaleidoscope of white radiance. My body is still flawless, perfect.
I’ve been here for the better part of five years and I’ve seen mannequins be born and then carted away almost every week. I’ve encouraged confused and frightened newborns too many times to count, and sincerely rooted for those whose moment had finally come.
Day after day, I’ve sat dead still for hours on end, endured astonishingly appalling clothes forcibly stretched over every centimeter of my body, and had my parts set in the most uncomfortable positions for extremely long periods. Not once have I flinched, or grimaced, or complained. And what do I have to account for it? A uniform, intact, unblemished artificial carcass that is getting me nowhere near my final form.
I prickle all over, and I have half a mind to bash my head on this spiteful mirror that keeps reflecting my perfection at me.
I dream of scabs revealing blackness underneath and the promise of a decaying exterior. I dream of the destruction of this man-made prison and the moment when, finally, finally, it’ll be my turn to become a real woman.
Born, raised, and living in Bucharest, Romania, Teodora is a marketing specialist at a national radio station. She has been reading exclusively in English since 2007 and has been writing in a language that’s not native to her for about 4 years.
She has flash fiction and short prose published on 101Words, Friday Flash Fiction, and Spillwords, and is also part of two anthologies published through Amazon, available in Kindle format and print-on-demand.
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