THE last I see of him is the leather glove that had struck me. It swings backwards now on the arm with the Devil tattoo as he walks around the corner and down the staircase from my apartment. Then, he’s gone, out of my life. I want to call after him. I want to say, ____, come back to me! and ____, please don’t leave me! I don’t know his name, so I don’t say anything. Standing in the doorway, paused between love and life, I wonder how I’ve come to be left by this man who was stuffed with so much of me.
It all began with the last man, really. George was a tall man who worked as a reverse engineer. I suppose it was his reverseness that I found attractive. On our first date he took me apart. He started with my dress when he came to pick me up and stopped at breakfast the next day with a childhood memory of my grandfather accidentally burning my yellow hair when I was eight. George said that he was going to try to put me back together again. He would make me better than I was. I told him not to forget an important part. He asked what that was, and I said, I want to marry you and have three babies. He abruptly excused himself to go to the bathroom. An hour later, my hope that he would return shriveled like the uneaten fruit he had pushed to the left side of his plate. He had taken a part of me with him, leaving the rest to hang precariously from my dress’ thin shoulder straps, so I left the IHOP in search of rescue. I found the Eye of the Cat.
The Eye of the Cat had a black cat with a gold eye for a sign. The cat was poised to prance over the façade of brick and multicolored trimmed windows. Through the shop windows, I saw the store’s exotic wares. One word was repeated throughout—voodoo. Although the morning shower flattened my hair, I remained outside, and watched and waited for an old woman to exit the shop. I prefer shopping alone. When she came out, she ruffled her shopping bags in her hands until she was happy they would suffer none from the rain. Then, she walked away with her head of blue-gray hair overlaid by a plastic bag and bent to the sidewalk. For a moment, I wanted to follow her, to see if she ever looked up again or to ask what was so important about the concrete or to snicker with her as I tried to get her to admit what was in the bags. The cat! I wanted to say. Is there a cat in the bag?
Instead, I stood for a few more minutes in the rain, scoping out the store and ensuring myself that no one else was inside. I took pictures on my phone and sent them to a friend, telling her I may not return. She replied, and I wrote back LOL, though I hadn’t read her message. I was all eyes for the voodoo shop.
A bell rang as I went inside. I was immediately taken aback by the smells. I hadn’t a clue what any of it was, so I’ll just say it was patchouli and spice and cinnamon and slaughtered chicken. All were blown about by a half dozen fans place haphazardly around the shop. The shopkeeper busied herself at the counter, handwriting labels and taking stock. I watched her from behind a display of supposedly magical stones. She was extraordinarily tall and surprisingly beautiful—I imagined she would be wacked out on voodoo juice with skin burnt by offerings to voodooness. Her orange and red headscarf was sweaty from work. Her fingers were long and slender, dotted by joints, and I wondered how many times the tips had been pricked by needles meant for dolls.
Before I realized what I had done, I was at the counter.
“Is that all, dear?” the shopkeeper said.
I looked at my hands. A book on how to make voodoo dolls, from sewing the clothing to stuffing the doll, was clutched there. I breathed in through my nose with such force that I wheezed as I stared at the book, my mind blank as to how it had come to be there. The woman on the cover was hard at work making her voodoo doll. I noticed a bit of myself in her, seated at that table, trying to put her wishes into something other than herself. Then, in one syllable I poured out my heart to the shopkeeper.
“Ugh,” I said with watery eyes.
“Yes, it is not all,” said the shopkeeper. “I know it is not all.”
“No?” I said.
“No. Now you wait here.”
The woman abandoned me at the counter. I watched as she walked smoothly through the shop. Her dress flittered, its pastels a whirl of colors about her erect frame, seeming to take her where it desired to go until she was gone from my sight. I did not move from the counter. The incense burning behind it eased my mind, so I did not feel I had any reason to leave. The sounds of the fans and chimes and the smells of exotic lands with tales I had never heard were intoxicating.
Minutes passed before the woman returned. She carried a med-ium sized box, held closed by its flaps. She set it on the counter between us, and she mumbled as she ran her hands along its top. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head until she mumbled one last thing. Her hands stopped with a slap atop the box, and her eyes rested on me again in their normal position, the pupils darker than her skin.
“This,” she said, “is for you.”
I wanted to touch the box, to caress it as she had, but I held my hand back.
“No. I can’t afford the box,” I said. I didn’t even know what was in it. “I’ll just have the book, please.”
She laughed to the corners of the room, her face swallowed by the hole her mouth formed.
“No,” she said. “You buy the book, but you get the box for free.”
“Free?”
“Yes. The box has most of what you’ll be needin’ for them spells. I know what you be seeking, and this box gonna help you get it. But you can’t open it till you get all the way home. Be best you take the long route.”
I did not speak. The question was in my eyes, and she heard it all the same. She turned and pointed to a picture on the counter. A handsome man with arms of blackened steel held her close to him on a tropical beach.
“Is how I got him,” she said.
My mouth became dry, and I couldn’t see anything except the box and the book. I paid with a credit card, and I was momentarily distraught when I realized I didn’t have to sign the receipt; I’ve practiced my signature for years, and I sign with the greatest of flourishes. Then, with the book and the unusually light box in my hands, I ran from the store. The shopkeeper laughed behind me, and I didn’t turn to see her smile.
My thoughts ran faster than me as I thought of all the men who had left me or who had merely passed me by. I thought of my sister, married and stretched to the brim with her third child. I slowed when I made the subway. On the train was a man. Well, there were many men. This one man, however, he walked over to me and held his hands on the vertical bar beside my head to steady himself.
“I’m Herbert,” he said.
Herbert had a beard that looked as if it were made from soapsuds. It dared to blow away with his every breath. Herbert told me in a whisper that he’d like to make love roughly to me. I told him that’s an oxymoron in my world, but he persisted.
“Like sandpaper on silk sheets.”
He was worried about suffocating me in his beard and washed it back up around his face.
“Hey, you like it?” he said. “I’m growing it out for Bike Week. Going to ride all the way down with a few buddies of mine. You want to go? You’d look real good on the back of my bike in some leather and denim. Get you a nice shirt and cut the sleeves off, button it down some.”
He pictured me right then and there out of my dumped dress and into his outfit, and I sort of liked it. I didn’t want him to know. I had a thing for bikers when I was in college, but I knew it would kill my parents. I was not the rebellious type. But I don’t like beards. I do leather jackets, though.
“I don’t have the cleavage,” I said.
“Don’t worry about them things. They’re all right. We’ll get you a pushup bra.”
I pressed the box between us. He noticed it for the first time.
“Where are my manners? Let me hold that for you.”
“That’s okay.”
Then, it was my stop.
The same thing happened all the way home. I met a business man at a street corner who told me his life story: he likes cats (I am a dog person), he was married once but his wife left him for someone else and took the children (he has a small penis), and he was seeking investors for an offshore oil company that will pay-off big (Ponzi scheme). He told me I should get in with him before he required a prenuptial agreement. I shook my head politely and went my way, thinking how nice his butt looked in those pinstripes. Then, there was the postman wearing those ridiculous blue shorts that always look faded; the socks are fun, though. What I liked first about him was his arms. My God, they were magnificent. As soon as I passed him, he told me in the same sentence that he works out because he wants to be a professional arm wrestler and could carry me to the altar. He was bewildered when I left him at an unknown address. Once at my apartment building, the landlord informed me that the elevator was broken, but that he’d like to ravish me across the threshold if he could only find the time to break his porn addiction.
By the time I reached my apartment I was exhausted from all of the attention, not to mention the box. It was so much heavier by the time I arrived home, and I wondered how much of the attention had been caused by the box. I knew it was not me. It seemed ordinary enough, the box, and I thought it must have been what was inside it that had caused all of the flirting. Whatever was inside was almost too much excitement for me. Almost. As I put it down on the floor and started to open it, Lady Bee insisted she be taken to the dog park. Remembering what the shopkeeper said, I took the box with me.
At the dog park, two gay men ran by me and talked about my shoes that I bought on sale. I want a man that notices things like that, except the sale part. I want a man like the guy who threw the Frisbee for his dog. He had a mean left arm covered in a tattoo of a devil eating a slice of cake. I liked the hat of the man standing at the fountain. He had a youthful style that didn’t cross the border into the land of MidLifeCrisis. Then, there was that guy who brought his wife flowers at the park. They were having a nice picnic, even if their blanket had a tear in it, though when I passed them, his apology for the business trip taking longer than usual turned into an apology for having an affair. She beat him with the roses, and I hoped for her sake that the roses still had thorns.
When Lady Bee was done with her business, I went back to the apartment with that box on my mind and in my arms. Lady Bee, I decided, would have to wait a while for dinner.
The box was ready to burst at its glued edges upon my return. I was excited by the terrifying thought of what was inside. I thought about what the voodoo woman said—is how I got him. I wondered what to do if a man was inside? What if he were the man of my dreams? The box was quiet, though my heart wasn’t. I stared at myself in the mirror, still clinging desperately inside that dress splotched from the rain. I ran into my bedroom and changed into a sleek black number I bought a while back. After brushing my hair, I lit a few candles and poured a glass of the wine that my sister bought for me three years ago when I received a promotion. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in the living room on the carpet, the box with the shy man waiting to be unwrapped on the floor across from me. I smelled his cardboard cologne before gulping down the rest of the wine. I reached for him, and pinching the flaps, timidly opened the box. I tried to show the best side of my face to the widening gap.
I was instantly disappointed and thought the shopkeeper had played a cruel joke on me. The box was full of clothing. Scraps of clothing. An arm of a jacket topped a pants leg. A hat. A blue sock and an athletic sock. Leather chaps, a wallet, and a guitar pick were layered beneath. It was all the disused trimmings of others’ lives.
I found another bottle of wine and sat on the couch. I’m in total despair, I said to Lady Bee, who joined me. It was not until I looked at the voodoo book on the coffee table that I realized what I had. Total idiot, I called myself. The hardcover was cold when I picked it up. The spells looked amazing, though some were lame. In the back were several recipes for cookies and tarts that I would have liked to try. By the time I put the book down again, every page was my body temperature.
I dug through my closet in search of my mother’s old sewing kit. Homemaker has never been on my curriculum vitae, so I imagined what my craftsmanship would be like. In the middle of excavating my closet, I found all the love letters boys wrote me while I was in school, including a letter from a girl who wanted to test the waters. I kept it because I liked the way she made hearts over her i’s. Dolls need more than stuffing, I decided. They should have heart, passion, love, and absurdity. A love letter has all of those things. I threw my diary in with the supplies as well. I would have no secrets with this man.
Back in the living room, I skimmed through the book again, stopping on major notes of interest. Some of the jargon was difficult, but I soon came into my own thanks to the glossary at the back. It was time to jump into action. The book suggested a doll for specific desires. That is a load of crap, I thought. I wanted a man, not a bunch of dolls, so I set about making the best doll possible, a man for all occasions.
I laid the scraps of clothing out on the floor of my living room until a drafted doll took shape there. Three different t-shirts made the upper body, each with a screen-printed design of places I would like to go. How these shirts with these specific destinations had come to be in the box I decided then and there to not question. Whatever magic the box possessed, I thought it best to trust in. One arm was all leather because I like my men to have a tough side, while the other arm uncannily resembled the tattooed man from the park. The head and hands were formed from an old tablecloth with a tear in it. I placed the tear along the cheek to give the doll some character. Leather chaps and pinstripe pants made up the legs. A cowboy boot shaped one foot and an Oxford loafer the other. I placed a sock inside each foot, one that silly postal worker blue and the other a classy argyle print. The doll was tall and I liked that.
I sewed one part of the doll’s body at a time. The chest I stuffed with the love letters and diary. The head was filled by pages from a disused dictionary. The rest of the body I stuffed with pages from a handyman book, Shakespeare, a Cosmo magazine (okay, three), and various papers, napkins, and a dish towel that happened to catch my eye. It took me all night. Lady Bee went to bed around two a.m. Engrossed by the work, time slipped by me. Before I finished the last of the sewing, I freshened up and checked myself in the door-length mirror. I was bewitching.
Then, I speedily finished the last of the sewing. I felt something change in the doll or in me. With the last few loops I felt as if I was tied to this man-doll. Something stirred within me that I hadn’t felt for many years without foolishness or guilt for having said it so many times before. I loved this man. I sighed as I tied the knot and cut the thread. Blindsided, I was thrown back onto the couch by the arm with the Devil tattoo. Then, the rest of the body jerkily came to life, and the man-doll rose to his handsomely height. He snatched the scissors from me and cut a hole in his head for his mouth and four more holes for his eyes and ears. He inhaled and exhaled as if he had just almost drowned. After a moment of examining himself, he turned to me.
“Well?” he said.
I said the first thing that came to my head.
“Why aren’t you more human?”
“Just like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You were only just born, and I created you!”
“Go ahead, name me Oedipus Rex then,” he said casually, the loose thread about his ragged mouth blowing as he breathed.
I grabbed the book from the table and searched for spells gone wrong and unexpected and transformation and nothing helped me.
“This is what all of your dates are like,” he said. “You sitting there wanting everything to be about you and your desires.”
I threw the book at him, and we continued to argue. I brought up that he hadn’t even noticed my dress. He yelled that I didn’t have the decency to sew his legs the same length. He threw his hat out the window. He didn’t like it. We danced like that for hours, until he declared that he had had enough and grabbed the phone.
“What’s the number for a cab?” he said.
I refused to give it to him, so he looked inside of his shirt and tore a yellowed page out. He dialed the number, and I watched his gloved fingers, glad I didn’t have to make those needless sews. I was disgusted that he was like this. That he was like all of the other men. I told him he wasn’t going to walk out on me like they did.
He hung up the phone and started for the door.
“Please, don’t leave.”
He spun around on the heel of his cowboy boot and faced me.
“I’m getting out of here,” he said.
“You can’t just leave,” I said, begging him with my hands to stay. “I have plans for us.”
“The hell you do,” he said. “I’ve read all those love letters. I know what you did to all those poor boys. I’m not staying here.”
And he left, and here I still am, standing in the doorway, awaiting his return. It’s not that fantastical, I think. Men always leave me with their silence. Husbands leave wives. Wives leave husbands. Parents leave children. Children leave parents. People leave one another, sometimes without saying a word. Why should I be any different? I’m not.
I think about running down the stairs after him. Doesn’t he understand what he means to me? Doesn’t he understand what all the men meant to me? I stuffed him with their letters. The whole time I am in the doorway I think about his name, and after a while I conclude that maybe man-dolls do not have names. After all, the shopkeeper at the Eye of the Cat did not say her husband’s name. I imagine her face-swallowing laughter chiding me when I tell her what has happened. It makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t bother to close the door. Instead, I feed Lady Bee, and then sit on the couch and drink more wine.
In the evening, I wake and see my landlord filling my open door with his frame. His hands alternate between a bottle of beer and slice of cold pizza. I can tell it’s cold because of how the cheese looks. He has no more hands to pull his shirt over his belly. When he sees I’m awake, he shrugs his shoulders and walks away.
I close the door.
In the weeks that pass I wait less and less for the man-doll to return. I think less often too about what he said to me in the heat of the argument, that I was stuffed with a little girl’s dreams. I hadn’t heard it at the time. Not really.
Then, one day, he’s on my doorstep after work. Seeing him makes me forget all about our argument. I know it’s him without seeing him. He doesn’t say anything to me. He can’t, and I understand without asking. He’s in a box, and I carry him tenderly inside. When I get him out, he’s a mess, so I set about sewing him up. I speak to him with every threading, careful to mend all of the loose ends. He groans with his deflated mouth with every loop and pull.
“Rex,” I say. That’s his name. “We’ll make it work.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
M.W. Fowler received an M.A. in Writing from Coastal Carolina University. His works are forthcoming elsewhere from Jelly Bucket, Used Furniture Review, Specter Magazine, and others. He is the author of Ezra Sound: How I Became a Giant, and is from Myrtle Beach, S.C.
LF #015 © M.W. Fowler. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, May 2012.
