Hollow Dolls, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

Melanie fell, the wood pounded her
back and legs. Marlene spit on her.
    “Tramp! Slutty fucking bitch!”
    The wood struck so many times and
wouldn’t stop. Then there was a cigarette burn on her arm and Melanie was gone.
     
    She ended up on a long sandy beach with
blue sky and turquoise water as far as she could see. The day seemed to last
forever as she walked and walked aimlessly on the beach. The sun was so bright,
she had to close her eyes. It was orangey pink on her lids, pretty, safe,
nourishing. She hated that she was wearing a black hoodie and couldn’t
understand why she didn’t just take it off. Then a crackle came from behind.
    Against the dense green forest curtain that
lined the beach, a tall expressionless white rabbit stood up straight, looking
at her. The rabbit shifted around in waves of heat from the sand. Melanie
squinted to focus, and her body drifted toward him. She wiped a sleeve over her
stinging eyes. Then he was right there, inches away. It was a man and rabbit
both. Melanie studied his face closely, occasionally tickling her nose on his
fine layer of lustrous fur. The Man-Rabbit stood perfectly still like a soldier
during inspection. He was a rabbit and then a man, and back and forth. He was
neither and both.
    He was a handsome man. Someone Melanie
knew intimately.
    She could tell he was about to speak and
turned her ear to his lips.
    He whispered, “You must learn to love.”
     “Who are you?” she asked. Then she waited
and waited, feeling his slight breath on her ear.
     
    The white rabbit fell, knocking on the wood
floor.
    Mel slid off the couch to her knees, followed
the sound, feeling around on the floor and got the rabbit back. Heat poured off
her face and all around her black hoodie. Breathless, she pushed up with everything
left in her limbs and stumbled for the door.
     
    As she pulled the hoodie up over her
shoulders it lifted her tee shirt up underneath, leaving her breasts out in the
night air. She tugged it down and sat on the curb. Cheering sounded out from across
the road, a hundred miles away. Rain washed her face, her old self dissolved
and a new alkaloid coagulated. Electrons regrouped, excited by the vibrating
lights on the wet road . Solve et coagula. A black cab horn blew a cannon
blast. Punk jaywalkers staggered and turned. They waved their arms. Beer
bottles smashed.
    The cab tires tore a strip of liquid
nitrogen off the blacktop, enveloping red tail lights. Jiggling neon popsicles
in the frozen cloud dropped to the pavement and shattered. Shimmered there like
lip gloss. The punks screamed with their puberty threshold voices, cackling birds,
odds and sods, arms waving in claims of drunk dominance. “This is our road!”
     
    They were grabby, clutching thieves,
stuck in the forevers—hoopy-loops of karma scouring the earth to find their next
booty, never knowing there was so much more. She sucked them in through her
eyes, onto the inventory ledger of souls. A pile of ill, dark, lost wanderers
in the warehouse of existence where proud ravens and magpies were possessed by
ego and a mere interpretation of trinkets, mounds of larvae teeming fomentation
over rats and roaches, all of whom were never aware of their preponderance or
how their multitudes proliferated. Mel was the Queen and Mel would send the
best of her Madagascar roaches, pirates to rape and pillage in the new world.
Peasants would follow their cum trail, a misdirection, and the truth would be
secrets kept, beauty for the few—the roaches of the world never seeing the
philosopher’s stone, the new Mel.
     
    Mel pulled the Imperial margarine tub out of the freezer. She
hadn’t thought about these for quite a while. She poured some Jack Daniels Tennessee
Honey and pulled the lid off the frozen container. Inside were two baggies bulging
with pills. One side blue, the other side green. She opened the green baggie and
dug in.
    A photo surfaced in pills. It was her with the man she knew but
didn’t. He was