Dolly

Elsa was dead.  She was not still, or resting peacefully.  She conducted herself through her living death within the tomb of a dingy apartment atop an old building, which had long housed a bar and billiards room on its bottom level.  Thursday through Sunday, like a drone, she clambered down old stairs at 6 pm to serve beer and bourbon to a room full of unmentionables, just another one of the faceless human beings. She could smile little false smiles and transport drunkenness about the room, she could collect a few tips, receive a paycheck and write checks to pay her bills, but there was no life in her anymore.  Her face would always be a pretty face, and there were indeed advances from the drunks though they never looked above her neckline, but she always quietly declined and retreated.  They had known subconsciously that she was dead, so there was little pursuit.  How can one look into dead eyes with any interest?  How can one see a transparent being, consisting of nothing but shades of the ashen, as anything but the ghost she is?  She was left alone to live out her death, and try not to remember her life before this end.  

Like dead flesh, Elsa felt nothing.  Not breathing in or out, or a beating pulse.  There was nothing circulating.  She felt an absence where here heart should be, a hollow cavity in her chest.  The upside to that is that it doesn’t hurt the way it used to.  It’s just not there.  It broke one day, for the last time, and every last piece must have disintegrated.  It must have dried up and turned to dust, before it ever should have rightly been so.  She couldn’t believe that it turned to stone, because the cavity felt much too empty.  There was a time when the weight crushed down upon her, but now there was a hollow void, in her chest and in her eyes.  She rarely looked in any mirror.  What she found looking back at her was a warped, transparent girl with no color left, one with the face of a corpse that she could see right through.  Her life had been all sharp edges and poisonous words, and little by little her spirit began trickling out of all the torn places.  

♥♥♥

She began alone, and remained so.  From an early age she was beaten down and stepped upon.  She was a pretty girl, but like a ghost. Few people really saw her, acknowledged her existence, and when they did the stones and arrows and words came flying.  Her internal edifice, like her skin, was pale and soft, easily pierced.  Once it all started, she never really had a chance.  She walked around, invisible, and full of invisible bruises, welts, and gashes, full of piercing shrapnel.  She learned to keep her face down, and not look lift her eyes, for what they see they do not ever understand.  

Don’t make them look.  They will hate me.  

She wondered if she had been born damned.

On a cloudy day in her 18^th year, Elsa sat on a crate in the back alley behind a coffee shop where she cleaned tables and dishes, reading a book when she heard footsteps echoing in the alley.  She didn’t look up.  She never did. 
He stopped near her, his shoes below her, dull and black.  Sitting still, waiting for them to move away or to enter the back door of the shop.  They stayed, however, for several minutes which felt like several years, and on that day she met the only person who had ever really seen her.  He was a tall, thin man, with pale skin and pale hair, but his eyes were dark and bright at the same time, like a star shining in a black sky.   He sat down next to her, offering a smile, and her life began again and ended on that same day.  If she had never looked up, do as she was supposed to do, perhaps she would still be alive.  But her eyes found his face.  He drew her in like the moths to the flowers in the dusk of summer nights.  His darkness captured her, and she was never free again.  

He was beautiful.  No one else would think so, it was just for her.  

“He is transparent, like me,” she thought to herself. “but there is a star inside him.”
An unconscious monstrosity of a man, he saw that she was already broken, because she had raised her eyes and allowed him access to the forbidden. Her own personal demon had found her, and the first time he saw her, he could taste her essence.  Like a vampire, he drank her dry from the first moment, and it was a ghastly love.

She was exactly what he needed, so he took her hand and led her away into a dream, and she became a parody.  Through it all, she never knew his name.

Elsa became a monstrosity herself, he made her a monster, knowing that she had already crossed an invisible line of the wretched.  There was a spectral choker around her neck, and she belonged to him.  He put her in the costumes he found suitable, and she lived in a doll house, which was indeed born from a dream, so full it was of intoxicating magic.  Her face was a gruesome contrast of pale skin, purple bruises and dried blood, like the red of her smiling lips.  She knew he was devouring her with his desideratum, and had no doubt that he loved her for it.  She saw it in his starry eyes, and felt it in his brutality.  It was so easy for him to make her what he wanted.  She was his dolly, and she saw how beautifully complete he was, as he saw how tragically incomplete she would always be.  It was the most obscene balance, and she had no choice but to love fiercely.  It would come to be the last thing she ever felt, and then one day, he disappeared.

She stayed in the doll house for a time, and then she walked away.  Taking what seemed useful, she made her way steadily in a new direction, which brought her to moderately sized town, where she found a sign in a window stating “Help Wanted.”  She answered the call, and began her living death anew.

Thus we arrive once again at the starting point.  What has been accomplished? Nothing but a brief history, and for Elsa, nothing but an interminable demise.  There she was, in a colorless place where no one really noticed her lack of color.  And there she stayed for several months, though time had long since lost all meaning.  Sometimes she would allow her thoughts to commence, but it would only lead to her thinking how little the need, how little it mattered.  There was nothing to feel, and nothing to think about.  She had no alchemy to alter her state, the preference was to wish for stillness inside.  Sadly, however, rest is fleeting.