Crash Dummy, A.K.A. I Don't See Your Name On It

a very short story

All the pretty white ladies stand like does in headlights before the impact. The head-on collided stand zero chance. Down their pear-shaped figures go, heads spinning until their skulls kiss the ground. That’s not the fun part, ‘cause they’re overly final. The ones close by are what get everyone going.

Some are unflinchingly tall, refusing to swivel their rigid necks. There’s no use in mourning their fallen sisters. Life, and it’s brutal departure, are nondiscriminatory - why cry over a planets’ orbit, a twinkling of a star, a strike of a comet? No use. Look ahead. Strange women they are, with the meaningless blessing of a missed bullet. That’s the best case scenario. Other women get grazed. They barrel down a river of shake, feet making music on the hardwood, dancing for no one. One might call them lucky, too, although the aftermath of such a scare lingers. Is it possible that those who best the seismic rapture wish they’d gone quiet, too? To rephrase: Can you be perfectly still once you’ve known convulsion? To rephrase: “What do you eat in the morning?”

“Omelettes, mostly,” Sasha replies. Behind her, a pearl-colored bowling ball cruises down the gutter.

Nancy clenches her hands together. Each fingertip turns a mix of red and cream from the sudden restriction of bloodflow. She’s crane-like in a laminated plastic booth. It’s shiny, like someone’d just poured oil all over it.

To prepare for a BP-esque spill, amongst a myriad of unthinkable other no’s, Nancy had conceal-carried wipes in her leather purse. She’d fished them out as Sasha had embraced her in a greeting hug. Before landing on the cold surface, her arm had buffered in rapid jerks over the material, scrubbing hard into what she couldn’t know and therefore couldn’t trust. Sasha had watched her aunt, not making noise, and decided it looked like a Parkinson’s-riddled attempt at clitoral stimulation. She had rolled her ankle around in circles, changing directions each time Nancy paused to breathe hard out of her nose.

“That’s good for you. I don’t like putting my fingers in the holes,” Nancy utters like a doll with no inflection change between her two estranged sentences.

“I told you, I’ll play.” Sasha was winning against the opponent, which was also herself. Earlier, the guy in the next aisle had asked if she needed a partner. When she’d declined, he stole one last glace at her and shuffled back towards his family of five.

“You know, I just have to tell you again; I’m so pleased with your new look. For so long, you were…” Nancy decidedly leaves her examination incomplete, with frays where comparisons should be. Sasha’s eyes meet the television facing her. An animation of a bowling ball getting thrown behind bars and playing a harmonica churns in a drab procession. The upper right-hand corner of the screen is broken, and ambitionless gray and green pixels take millisecond-long turns devouring one another. In fine print: Fun Technologies© 2006.

“Yeah, a lot has changed. That’s life.” Sasha claws at her shirt, making a parachute over her abdomen. Meanwhile, Nancy surveys the gallery exhibit as it lives and twists, its blood pumping through each artery under skin with little raised hairs. Behold: a sculpture who’d been re-chiseled in the cloak of the night, with no edits to the curation. The woman searches for places that change had slid into, her militant French twist pulling her cheeks and eyes into second position.

What would happen if Sasha sprinted down the lane into the white women? She had heard, maybe from a friend, from when leisure still seeped into the cracks of obligation, that the bowling balls return through a conveyer belt underneath the floor. So, if she were pelted towards a target, she would come back all scrunched up in the ball return. Would her limbs’ angles swarm around her neck like limp ivy? In that unseen journey, what shape would take her? “Have you talked to Mom lately?”

“Your mother? No. I was surprised you even drove all this way. I guess,” she rubs her polished nails against her tiny cross necklace, “you don’t take after her.”

Sasha wants to let her back take over for her face, her spine curving like a cobra in a basket.

“There’s some things going on with her.”

Nancy scoffs, sizing up her niece’s posture in Velcro communal shoes. The knees are bent slightly inward, weight resting disproportionately on her left hip. On her opposite side, her foot twirls in ovals, caught in lackadaisical repetition. It was a shame that the inside, clearly, had not followed suit of her disciplined appearance. Maybe her mother had convinced her that a makeover would fix everything. Sasha would take that type of advice seriously, for the two knew only each other’s orbits, forever resigned to their own worlds. A wave of pity laps in her stomach, warm and charitable.

“Right. Ever since she was a girl.”

---

A dirty beige car appears purplish from the parking lot’s electrically screaming BOWL-O-RAMA sign. Atop the hood sits the car’s owner, polishing off what remains of a cigarette. Her hand, ski lifting from her lips and back, is stiff from the biting weather. She won’t call her mother tonight. She’s failed, and that’s not news worth announcing until the morning guns down the sky. There might not even be a grin as Sasha tells her how “Nancy” had won after an accidental double strike. In the lady’s defense, with all of her neuroticisms, those bowling balls were practically vibrating with DNA. The cigarette butt is flicked into a vacuum with no people. Smoothing her clothes with her fingers, something frigid runs through the knuckles and into the arms. Shot up through the wrists, swaying forward with a soft gasp, Sasha looks down at an unrecognizable body. Her legs are just like two pulseless pins. They are feminine, which means they are waiting to be knocked out. From her pelvis to the tips of her shoes, there is a coldness that isn’t of her, nor of the air whipping her hair in sporadic bursts. This is all that has invaded her, like tile floors and beds with wheels, like being put on hold for hours, like overtime every night. The new world is so blank-white and frozen. It could be this way forever: foreign bodies lying, then standing, then waiting.

Cover photo by fab4chiky on flickr