Mannequins
By Pearl Ginter
I felt my eyes glazing as I consumed a second glass of whiskey, pretending to listen to my dinner companions. They had swarmed me on the street, a mass of perfumed bodies with faces painfully contorted into smiles. Having slept little in recent days, I was momentarily tricked into being swept away to dinner with this crowd that had, at one point or another, decided I was their friend. I allowed for the mistake to play out, even though I didn’t have enough money for the meal.
Remembering this particularly disconcerting fact at the table, I became wrapped up in trying to come up with an escape plan, a way to get out of the restaurant without having to pay the bill. These people would probably think I was cheap and strange, which would be almost true, and maybe they would stop inviting me places, which would be great. After devising my retreat, I emerged back out into the conversation only to find that it had stopped. All movement had ceased, and everyone in the restaurant had turned into mannequins, the life extinguished from their faces.
I finished my drink and looked closely at the people sitting at my table. The girl sitting to my right had a curious expression on her face. Her mouth was bent into a smile, but her eyebrows jutted down too sharply, and the blankness in her pupils was underscored by a menacing shadow somewhere far beneath them, so she suddenly looked cruel. When I leaned in to inspect her, I noticed a peculiar varnish in her skin tone. Her entire face was pulled over with a thin layer of clear rubber.
The man sitting to my left had copper wire hair that scratched my palm when I ran my hand over it. I got out of my chair and went over to inspect the woman situated directly across from me. She had frozen in a comic position, with a half-opened mouth and one half-closed eye. I touched one finger to her jaw line and heard a startling crack. Her head snapped off her neck and rolled down into her lap. I clenched my teeth together so as not to scream and ran into the bathroom. I needed to see my own face, my own skin. I was terrified that it too had turned to something terrible.
Once there, I shut the door and stared into the mirror. A dim light flickered in the depths of an otherwise chokingly black surface. I squinted into the darkness and tried to make out my face. There was a shadow there, and I thought that it moved the same way I moved, but I could not be sure. The shadow was not of the same hue as the darkness around it, it didn’t even seem to belong in the same spectrum. It was, I imagined, the blackness of a coffin, as seen only by those who have had the misfortune of being buried alive. Fright burning in my throat, I escaped the bathroom, hearing the hum of conversation that had apparently started up again in my absence.
I did not look around to see the people at my table, but went straight for the door and left the restaurant. Crossing the street quickly, I felt a drizzling rain nestle in my hair and crawl down my face.
Pearl Ginter lives in North Carolina with her husband. She loves to write short stories and is currently working on her first novel.