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Scream
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Paper Dolls

Kyle Hemmings

    You have reduced your ex-lovers to paper dolls. Each one has a name inked over the heart or where the heart should be. You glue them together and when that doesn’t work, you try masking tape. Now they are holding hands. With a little imagination, they can almost stand up. You wash your pots and pans, meticulously scraping off bits of meat, but you can’t forget your paper dolls. Do paper dolls get hungry and why do you starve them until they are paper-thin? This love is wasteful and sad. You can’t even fuck a paper doll.
    At night, you sleep with them. They are snug next to your pillow. In dreams, in dreams of empty rooms, the paper dolls follow you wherever you go. They need instructions. They never complain of how you once cheated them out of love, dirty love, the exquisite feel. They are still, perhaps in a deep trance they cannot recover from. You ask them if they can still feel something. They ask you if you ever felt anything.
    But you have a premonition that they will fall apart like so many traumatized girlfriends who will remain folded for life. You awake. Brush off that dream. You let your paper dolls stay on your bed because nothing matters.
    You notice that at least one is crumpled, another, almost shredded; perhaps, you tossed and turned too many times during the night. Perhaps you reached out and attempted to grasp and grope. Perhaps during a dream, you spoke to them and they wouldn’t listen and you attacked.
    You take a cab to work and no matter how many times you look in the rear view, you cannot see the whole of the driver’s face. His accent reminds you of crossed borders, refugees who left too much behind. You leave a generous tip. Because you’re still able to work up a dollop of pity. You take the elevator to the 13th floor where you network with three law partners. In the office, several women with legs crossed, faces expressionless as stone, are waiting for you.



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