I go to a washer in the corner where no one will see me. I can’t believe the clothes I decided I couldn’t live without. My three nice button down shirts that I never wore, one pair of jeans, seven tattered old band t-shirts, a sweater I hate but only wore because She bought it for me and She only seemed to love me when She could dress me up like the youngest brother of four sisters or like the one errant male doll in a pile of nipple-less, plastic beauty queens. It seemed that every week she came home from the store with clothes for another man or for some kind of sex change she had planned on in the future. These clothes never fit me in anyway and the colors could not look worse on my body. When you wear little more than jeans, black t-shirts and the occasional sweatshirt it comes off as more than a little weird when you get crammed into a flowered shirt whose neck buttons will never meet but whose shoulders end inches later than yours. As if you might want to leave the option of shoulder pads. Like doll clothes and prom tuxedos they were only meant to match the Her outfit. Sure some of them looked fine and sensible and cost much more that I was ever willing to spend, even when I did have a job. Sweet girl, sure. She just wanted us to be as irrevocably happy as those matching plastic dolls with their pink dream house and their permanent smiles. I thought that maybe being the doll would be like being that one lucky male doll at the bottom of a pile of leggy, nude girl dolls. But then one day I walked into the bathroom and saw our his ‘n hers towels and our three-blade razors and the parade of man perfumes in height order and our pink bathmat and potpourri chips. And when I looked down I found nothing but a mannequin’s smooth, rubber leg joint where my equipment once hung.

Labels: Novel