🦋: Tombstone Keys || dolls, commoditization, abandonment, conformity, mutilation, transformations, violence, gods?, angels?, curious to know if anyone gets the title since it's fairly obscure and opaque
It's funny, isn't it? What is and isn't fashionable. Changes with the weather sometimes, others times things stick like glue.
There aren't many dolls left anymore. Not much use for them since the gig economy took over.
The doll aesthetic, though?
So hot right now.
Can't go a minute in a sleepy village without seeing a girl with porcelain mask or clockwork gloves or something else "dollcore."
Sometimes a literal doll core, showing oh-so-coyly from a provocatively low neckline, elegant crystal facets nestled in between so much garish flesh.
I grimaced as just such a number went mincing by, sundress all embroidered with primroses, hair coiffed and topped with a canted, raffish arrangement neither quite fascinator nor derby hat. All that kept it from being chintzy was the price tag with more zeros than class.
It might have been a convincing display, if not for her airs.
While a doll might once have been bedecked so by its owner, any would have done all it could to avoid notice, even in such an getup. Certainly, none would have walked with so much...heaving and jiggling of flesh.
I brushed the thoughts away as I followed the girl down the street. There is, of course, no accounting for taste, and yet that saying is so rarely afforded to the more daring of us, those who actually broke norms.
Like it or not, dolls were "in." Or at least their aesthetic was.
Only problem is they weren't made anymore. Hadn't been for decades. On the other hand, given the number produced, it was easy to find old stock to break down for parts.
First, it was just the broken and worthless, of course, but then, well, fashion demands nothing but the best.
Flesh might decay, but dolls never did.
The thought brought with it bitter awareness of the once-taught skin that now sagged and slumped tiredly about my face.
Dolls just...went on existing, no matter what changed, untouched by the passing of the years.
Buyers started scouting estate sales and secondhand stores, desperate to find anywhere a well-maintained family heirloom might have been carelessly tossed out, hungry for the payday such a find could bring, like so many vultures...no, vultures ate carrion; these were predators.
Then, of course, the market caught on, as it always does, and deals became rare as the pickings became slim. There's only so long you can drain an irreplaceable resource before prices skyrocket.
The cheap knock-offs from overseas were simply no match for the real, vintage item.
This girl, well, she clearly had the means to afford it. The parts she wore were pristine, or had been before they'd been scalped. My fingers clenched, not as smoothly as they once had, true, but still with a force than belied their gnarled form.
It was revolting. Sacrilegious. Dolls had been marvels of engineering, masterpieces of ingenuity. Beautiful, yes, but not for porcelain shells and glittering cores. Beautiful because they were a thing made for a purpose, made to last, effective and graceful no matter the task.
The beauty lay in how they'd been made with such care by human hands, the ineffable meeting of the mundane and the sacred.
No, not the mundane...for dolls were not mortal, purposeless things, cursed with free-will and the capacity for sin. Dolls were created, yes, but divine.
Dolls were as angels, wheeled, mechanical things of inerrant purpose and inscrutable construction.
Angels on whom God had turned His back.
Angels now cast from heaven for the sin of having shining wings that pleased the eye, no matter they'd once been used to fly.
She turned to face me, eye vacant, smile vacuous, devoid of everything but life.
I shut my eyes, trying to forgive her sins. It had been her hunger that destroyed, if not her hands.
I didn't fear death as she did. Nonexistence was simply that. This fate, though, how much worse?
That a thing once given purpose might be hacked apart and used as but aesthetic trappings?
I could think of no worse fate.
A pity I couldn't inflict it on her. She'd been made for no reason but a grunting, sweaty collision of flesh, some tepid spurts of what passed for passion.
If anything, well, I'd done her a favor.
The thought amused me as I made the switch, peeled the near-putrid skin off my frame and replaced it with her face and hands.
Some creators found meaning in their creations, whether they wanted to or not.
~🦋
