[#030] What a Dummy

His mouth dropped into a silent scream as I tore him from the box.

He was perfect, right from the heavy, wooden shoes to the sheen of his parted hair. I turned the dummy over and pulled aside the back of his crisp tuxedo to reveal the triggers and switches lined up along his core, and I dashed to the bathroom to try him out in the mirror.

One trigger opened his mouth and lifted his eyebrows, while a lever tied to his eyes swept his glassy stare from side to side. My heart leapt when my fingers met the little pull-rings attached to the sides and I discovered I could lift his arms, and I spent at least ten minutes gibbering at myself and flailing the dummy's little body around like a cartoon.

By the time my arm grew tired and I realized just how heavy he was, I carried my new friend back into the bedroom and set him up on the little rocking chair I'd purchased for him from the yard sale down the street.

Then I turned back to the shipping container, and a little glossy flash at the bottom caught my eye. I reached into its depths, shoving aside heaps of packing peanuts and pulling out a stack of Polaroids.

"Are you kidding me?" I grinned. "This is so old-fashioned! Who even takes these anymore?"

I glanced back at the chair. Had the dummy's eyes moved? I was sure they pointed straight at me when I set about cleaning up the mess, but now they gazed at the bookshelf to the left. They seemed to comb over the titles of my photo albums and wander over the many large knives displayed around them in their elaborate sheathes.

I shrugged it off and turned back to the photos, expecting some evidence of the piece's supposedly storied history. After all, the auction page suggested he had performed in every corner of the country for decades on the hand of a small-time performer. I flicked through the pictures slowly, sifting through old cars in dark parking lots at sunset and messy closets turned upside down, always with a view from somewhere low and cluttered.

But the dummy didn't show in any of them.

Instead, you'd see bits of a person. Perhaps a pair of legs in front of a kitchen sink, or the back of a head in a driver's seat. The subjects always seemed preoccupied and unaware of the observer. I could feel my own jaw slacking open as I flipped through more and more, and eventually I fell upon a rear-shot of a man typing on a computer. I squinted at the screen and recognized the fuzzy Ebay layout. Then my gaze flicked to the shiny, plastic hand projecting into the image from the bottom of the frame, and I realized at last who had taken these photos.

I glanced back up at the dummy, and his stare had shifted to the right. He was glancing over the trophies mounted near my bed, the wooden shoes and glassy eyes I'd cut from the subjects of my own hunts and arranged into a neat shadowbox I'd picked up at the mall.

I grinned and crouched before him as he turned to look at me, his own eyes growing wider by the moment as his tiny, hollow brain processed the situation around him.

"S'awright, Charlie?" I asked as I tugged the blowtorch out from under the bed. "Rethinking your life choices?"