I

Her boyfriend was on his computer all the time.
    He would go home after work, and he would sit down at his computer and tie up his phone line, so that when she wanted to call him, and tell him that she needed something, or that she loved him, or that she was having the hardest day of her life ever yet, he was always unavailable.
    One day, while he was at work, she went to his house and logged onto his computer.

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    She discovered he had been going through listings of mannequins for sale on eBay. He had earmarked pages of angry-looking brunettes, small Asians with black bangs, and alarmed-seeming blondes without legs.
    Her boyfriend, it appeared, liked mannequins with pretty faces and missing appendages, or great bodies and no heads.
    And, from what she could tell, he was only one of an entire group of men who spent all their time buying and selling mannequins to one another online.

When her boyfriend stopped going to work, he spent all his time buying mannequins online.

On their personal websites, they wrote about their female mannequins who loved country music, and their female mannequins who read romance novels, and their female mannequins who were supposedly blood-related to other female mannequins on their websites.
    One of the men was selling a CD-ROM he had made, featuring his female mannequins with elaborately staged acts of mock violence being perpetrated upon them. He had posted a disclaimer to his site.
    "Mannequins are not real people," it read. "I can chop them, tie them, hang them, and cut them. According to some psychologists, many ordinary men would also have such kinds of fantasies. It does not reflect anything in real life. Do not send hate letters to me. They will not be answered."
    Later that night, when she saw her boyfriend, she didn't say anything about any of it.

II

The following week, her boyfriend announced he was quitting his job. He told her now he was going to become an artist, working, as he put it, "in the genre of womanhood."
     She thought of the mannequins.
    When her boyfriend stopped going to work, he spent all his time buying mannequins online. His apartment, which she rarely spent time at anyway, since it was already overcrowded with his things, began filling up with mannequins. They sat around him in various poses, some of them in wigs.
    Her boyfriend told her that he was going to do something to them so that they would be art.
    But exactly what was unclear.
    She tried to be encouraging. After all, that was what her parents had always done when they found themselves in an encounter with someone who considered himself to be a highly creative spirit.

"Are you having sex with them?" she asked him. "No," he told her, "I'm not."

    Not long after, they were driving across town to have dinner at a German restaurant where all the waitresses wore authentic dirndls. When they were almost there, her boyfriend said he had something to tell her. She told him to pull the car over.
    In fact, he said, he had two things to tell her.
     One, he had genital warts and had neglected to tell her this.
     Two, he was having strong sexual feelings toward the mannequins, feelings of such a great and passionate desire that he found working on them nearly impossible because of a raging, near-constant erection.
    In comparison, she thought the genital warts were underwhelming.
    "Are you having sex with them?" she asked him.
    "No," he told her, "I'm not."
    She decided to act as if it were all very funny and he were very dear.
    "What a hoot!" she cried.
    After she drank a beer at the restaurant, though, she got mad at him about something small, and cried.
    They went home.

III

She lay alone in her own bed late at night and thought about her boyfriend. She imagined he was sleeping in the darkness of his own apartment, surrounded by the now crowd of mannequin women, curled up in his bed as the mannequins stood around him naked, their asses shoved out and their hands winding down between their legs. She hated the mannequins, she thought. They never blinked or flinched or even moved. She fell asleep at night, dreaming her suspicions.

He overflowed with an excessive kind of love for her.

    Her life had always been hard. Both her parents had been killed in so horrible a way as to make even the mention of them entirely impossible. She had only had one boyfriend other than this one, and that was a very long time ago. He had rarely spoken to her. Once, that boyfriend told her that he loved her in the same way that he loved his mother. She had gone off to college but remained isolated and insecure there. Her major was so interdisciplinary that it rendered all her educational experiences, both intellectual and social, entirely transitory. Later, she got a job as a secretary. After that, she worked as a fact-checker. Generally, she did not like other people.
    But then this boyfriend had come along. He had come sidling up to her at a party. She could tell by the way that he talked that he was from a good family, maybe even better educated than she was.
    When he asked her for her phone number, she gave it.
    On their first date, he showed her photographs of the time he had gone to Bora Bora as a child, and he put his arm around her. It had made her uncomfortable, but she had thought she could try to get used to it.
     For some reason, as their relationship went on, he overflowed with an excessive kind of love for her.
    Except for brief bouts, they were in love.

IV

A week after the confession in the car, her boyfriend was sleeping over at her apartment.
    In the early morning hours, she jerked herself violently awake.
    Her boyfriend was sitting up already, his head at an angle, staring down at her in the dark.
    "What, what?" she shouted up at him.

Did they lie together in his bed, him thrusting back and forth on the amazing hardness of her curvature?

    She was forever dreaming of her parents, about finding their grossly mangled and bloodied bodies, or having to dispose of the morbid wreckage of their car. So being awakened in the middle of the night often made her alarmed and angry.
    He said, "I had sex with one of them."
    She tried to think which one of his ex-girlfriends or former co-workers he had betrayed her by fucking. She would leave him, she vowed in confusion. He had been acting strangely, and now she knew why, and so she would leave him, and she would hate him forever until they were both dead.
    "I had sex with one of them," he repeated.
    It dawned on her: he was talking about the mannequins.
    What had they done?, she wondered. Did they lie together in his bed, the one flat out on her stomach, her ass tilted into the air, him thrusting back and forth on the amazing hardness of her curvature? Or was it the one half bent-over all the time, arms splayed out, legs at a toe-teetering angle, him pumping happily away from behind? Had he liked it? Was it good? Was it better than her? Were the two of them now so in love they would go running off together, and she would never see him again and have to spend the whole rest of her stupidly long life alone, with only this conversation playing over and over in her head like some kind of perverse broken record?
    She did not know. She did not know. She did not know.

V

The next morning, she had an interview for a job.
    Inside a warehouse, she sat across a desk from a man who told her this type of work was assembly-line. She would be a dresser, putting clothes and accessories onto dolls that looked like a male celebrity. After the dolls were dressed, they would be boxed and shipped off to stores.

He would spend hours on the Internet, looking for exactly the right pair of boobs.

    "This is an important job," the man told her. "This is a crucial part of the process," he said.
    "Yes," she told him.
     By 9:18 a.m., she was standing at a table in front of a stack of dolls. There were small piles of miniature navy blue suits, and little towers of brown rectangular briefcases, and tiny mounds of white coffee mugs, and itsy-bitsy arrangements of black rubber eyeglasses in front of her.
    The doll was not that different from Barbie, except its belly protruded, and it had a buzz cut.
    She picked up the first doll and pulled its arms through the jacket sleeves, slid the rubber-waistband pants over its tummy, affixed the glasses to its face, secured a mug in its hand, and slipped a pair of black shoes on its feet.
    She looked at the doll, now dressed, and fixed the tie so it was straight.
    Then she ran out to the parking lot and threw up next to her car.
    She left without telling the man she had quit.
    She spent the rest of the day in bed, the shades drawn, the television on, food containers piling up all around her.

VI

Her boyfriend, she thought, staring up at the ceiling, was probably very busy right now.
    First, he would be spending hours on the Internet, looking for exactly the right pair of boobs. The words in his head as he did this would be "round," "large," and "perky." He would end up with more boobs than he had expected. So he would collage them artfully onto his bulletin board.

When it was dry, he would pop out a new big humongous boob, the best boob ever made by one man.

    He would saw the head off his favorite mannequin, remove its legs from its torso and detach both of its arms. After that, he would lay the midsection on his work table, pick up some of his clay and start to layer the clay onto the boobs. He would run his hands back and forth across the boobs, up and down, as he did this. By this point, his erection would be raging.
    He would mix up a bucket of silicone and paint the boobs with this latex mix. When that was dry, he would add fiberglass and coats of polyester resin. When that was dry, he would remove this hard outer shell from the original boob. The new boob in his hand would be a negative boob. He would layer more fiberglass inside that, and when it was dry, he would pop out a new big humongous boob, the best boob ever made by one man. With this boob, he could make perfect boobs forever. He would stand with the boob in his hand, smiling to himself.
    This boob is good, he would think.
     For her, it took everything she had to change the channel on the television.

VII

When she left the house to stock up on more food, it was dark out, and there was no moon. She pulled her car into the supermarket parking lot, and put her hand behind herself into the back seat, flailing it around for something to break her out of the spinning in her head. Her hand wrapped around something, and when she drew it forward, she saw it was holding one of the celebrity male dolls. She must have brought it with her when she ran from the old job to her car. She held the doll close to herself and wrapped her arms tight around its body. The hard acorn of its head jutted into her chin. She bent her head down to kiss the doll in the darkness of her car.
    "I love you," she whispered to the doll. "I really do."
    When she looked back up again, an old Armenian woman was paddling hard and fast past her car window, staring at her and frowning.

VIII

A month later, a woman showed up at her boyfriend's house as they were sitting on his couch eating TV dinners and watching Pet Emergency.

Every night, she dreamt she was being chased by a six-foot tall plastic penis, covered in latex warts, through the hallways of her childhood home.

    Her boyfriend went downstairs, and she heard the woman saying, " . . . very important . . . ," " . . .totally hot . . .," and " . . . utterly of the zeitgeist." Her boyfriend came back upstairs. He sat down on the couch and didn't say anything.
    When an ad for flea spray came on, he told her the woman wanted to exhibit his now-very-large collection of big- boobed mannequin art in her gallery. He told her the woman said his art was very important, extremely hot and totally of the zeitgeist.
    There was no denying, she thought, that her boyfriend had been spending all his time lately making mannequins that looked like large-breasted women from another planet ready to fuck at the drop of a hat.
    This much was true.
    Meanwhile, she was spending every one of her waking hours painting fine veins and skin tone onto $75 dildos with forty-nine Hispanic women under rows of fluorescent lights.
    At this time in her life, she was passing every night dreaming she was being chased by a six-foot tall plastic penis covered in latex warts through the hallways of her childhood home as she screamed out at the top of her lungs for her absentee parents.
    This was the story of her life.
    She said, "That is the best news I have ever heard."
    He said, "You are absolutely right."
    On TV, a man in scrubs slit open the stomach of a cat with a scalpel and reached deep inside.

IX

The night her boyfriend's gallery show opened, she went to his apartment.
    He was not at his apartment, because he was at the gallery with the woman who owned the gallery, probably standing in the middle of a room filled with the women he had made, trying to cover up his own erection.

When she sat, she heard a funny hollow noise from inside the sofa.

    She looked through all of her boyfriend's drawers, and she went through every one of his cabinets, and she looked under every piece of his furniture, and she peeked into all of his cubbyholes, and she pried into every one of his corners, and she stared at all of his things, and she pushed her way into every one of his hiding places, until she had overturned it all, altogether.
    After she had ransacked her boyfriend's apartment, though, she began to cry.
    As she wept, she sat down on the couch.
    When she sat, she heard a funny hollow noise from inside the sofa.
    She stood up, pulling back the seat cushions that smelled of cat urine, and banged her fist on the hard wooden planking underneath.
    It made a dim and muffled noise, as if someone had gone through the trouble of taking a certain female mannequin, doing something horrible to it, then hiding it away from his girlfriend inside his couch.
    When she pulled back the covering, she saw that, why, yes, in fact, there was a mannequin in there, and it was naked.
    She reached into the couch and pulled the mannequin out by its wig. It was the mannequin whose mouth always hung ajar. Her boyfriend had once told her that was what made this mannequin special. At the time, she had thought that was what made this mannequin look retarded.
    She let go of the mannequin, and it fell to the carpet.
    When she rolled it over with her foot, she saw what her boyfriend had done.
    He had, it appeared, customized her.

X

What her boyfriend had actually done was spend a lot of time looking at the mannequin out of the corner of his eye, and spent days holding himself back, trying hard to redirect his thoughts elsewhere, losing himself in his beer, concentrating on CNN, trying to think about anything and everything in the world that did not involve drilling orifices into mannequins.

There she lay looking up at him, her mouth a little agape.

    But, one day, of course, he had fallen.
    A man does not spend all his time making the world's most perfect woman, so one day he may deny himself this woman because of what others may or may not think or know or not know.
    That was his justification.
    Then, he fell upon her.
    First, he cut a hole of just about the right size between her legs with a hole-saw. It took some time, and tiny pieces of fiberglass fell about his hands like sharp snow as he did it, but he nevertheless stayed honest and true to his work ethic. The sweat on his brow proved it.
    Next, he found a nice square of his best sixty-grit sandpaper and spent some time rubbing down the edges of the hole that he had made to a smooth and unfrightening level. After that, he found a can of tomato soup in his pantry closet, cut its top and bottom off and emptied the can's contents into his sink. He stuffed two mismatched tube socks into what was, really, now, no longer a soup can at all. And then, finally, he placed a small plastic baggie inside of it. At last he was finished.
    What they did, the mannequin and the man, was mostly quiet, except, perhaps, for the sound of some faint squeaking. It did not feel lonely or wrong, but instead rather poignant.
     When it was over, he placed the mannequin inside the couch.
    There she lay looking up at him, her mouth a little agape, waiting for the next time that he would come and pull her to him.
     Eventually, though, it got so that when he kissed his girlfriend, it surprised him when she moved.

XI

Standing in her boyfriend's apartment, she thought that she could go downstairs to her boyfriend's workshop and find a piece of metal there that looked strong, and that could come back upstairs, and that by the time she was even close to the mannequin, she'd be inserting the metal into the mannequin's face in such a way that the mannequin's face would cave in underneath it.

Her boyfriend's penis was pointing at the girl like a metal detector at the beach.

    She could play the mannequin as if it were the world's greatest oversized xylophone. She could bang it here, and smash it there, all along its imaginary keys, squashing it to bits. Teeth would fly and fingers would break, but in her head, it would all sound like music.
    When she was finished, she could pick up a half-moon from one of the mannequin's boobs and put it in her bra. She could take one of the mannequin's broken fingers and stick it into her hair. She could find the soup can and stuff it in the back of her underwear.
    Then, just like that, she could go down to the gallery and walk up to the woman who had given her boyfriend the gallery show, and she could lean into her and say, "I just wanted to tell you, I think this show is GREAT."
     And then, she could spot her boyfriend across the room, talking to a woman wearing a rainbow-colored kimono, and she could see that her boyfriend's penis was pointing at the girl like a metal detector at the beach.
    So, HELLO, she would say to her boyfriend, stepping between him and the kimono.
     LOOK WHAT I FOUND, she would cry, turning around and pulling down her underwear, so everyone would see the soup can in her underwear.
     And, as she bent over in front of her boyfriend, she would think, "Now he will hardly be able to keep his hands off me, and he will never leave."

XII

Instead, though, the girlfriend took off all her clothes and climbed inside her boyfriend's couch, balancing the seat cushions on top of the wooden seat so it all slid back into place, and she lay there, just like that, inside his couch, waiting for her boyfriend to come back home.
    A few hours later, the boyfriend came home, feeling somewhat surprised by how actually quite happy he was, now that all the women he had made were sold and were no longer standing around waiting expectantly for him.
    Unfortunately, though, he realized, his girlfriend was nowhere to be found.
    He sighed and sat down on the couch.
    As he sat, he heard a dim and muffled noise coming from inside his couch, as though someone had gone through the trouble of hiding herself away inside of it.
     He stood up and drew back the pillows, pulled away the wooden covering underneath, and there he saw his girlfriend, lying naked and stiff as a board, staring straight up at the ceiling above her, her mouth a little agape.
    The boyfriend reached inside the sofa and pulled his girlfriend out and into his arms.
    And then, in a fit of passion quite unlike anything either the boyfriend or the girlfriend had ever experienced, the boyfriend and the girlfriend fell upon each other to the floor.
    The boyfriend, for his part, forgot about the mannequins that had filled his apartment.
    The girlfriend, for her part, forgot about the plastic penis that had chased her through the hallways of her mind.
     The mannequin, for its part, sat watching, its mouth propped open as if it were shocked, as the two people before her flipped and flailed inside each other's arms.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
		Susannah Breslin is the author of You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?, a short story collection from Future Tense Books. Currently, she is at work on a semi-autobiographical novel, If Only These Hands Could Talk, based on her experiences in Porn Valley. Her writings, photographs, and comics have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Details, Salon, The LA Weekly, and Variety, among many other publications. She is also a reporter on Playboy TV's "Sexcetera."
		Nerve Features:    Hey Doll, Mannequins, The First Time She Died While Having Sex