Perched on a marble sink, red lips sketched on with monastic precision, Petra whispers to her reflection: “Tonight, the stage is ours.”
Three dozen roses rest without ease behind her, slumped on the dressing room table like exhausted suitors. One has dropped its petals in a neat heart shape. The air smells like leather and aquanaut. Her hairspray, her sweat, the ghost of talcum. Her silk bustier smells like spit. She wears pure frangipani oil and blood accord.
On her left is the door with her silk robe draped upon a nail. On her right, sitting on top of a cedar chest, Pepper the dummy.
Pepper is A walnut puppet with tiny, shiny, black oxford shoes made to be worn by a child entering into Holy Communion. Someone, years ago, took time to press real human eyelashes into his lidless eyes. his cornea carved in wood and painted with soot. tuxedo pressed with cornstarch. bowtie slightly askew. He does not breathe or blink. Petra has to remind herself of this often, as outlined in the rules.
She leans toward him, lips centimeters from his wooden forehead. The stage lights behind the mirror warms his tiny features. Her lips enjoy the heat, chest aching with a feeling she refuses to name. a partner can not escape being a burden, the audience can not escape being a witness.
“Pepper, my love. If you can hear me,” she says softly, “give me a sign.”
some brute knocks on the door. Joe, her manager, pops his head in.
“They’re on their feet, Petra. They want more! get your ass out there for the encore!”
She doesn’t answer. She watches herself in the mirror. The way her face flesh drapes over her skull. The way her mouth rests, wet and open, waiting for anything to enter.
Somewhere, far beneath the theater floor, is a room that smells like Vaseline and graphite. The Dummy Room, where Pepper was born. The maker assembled his wooden frame and whispered into the lacquer and screws. The man who made him had many names, but we don’t speak them out loud. He whistled through his teeth at his creation. He spoke only in passive voice.
“There, the mouth is carved. Hinges are tested and good. The cavity was left open.”
His studio is full of shelves, each crammed with dolls floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Each holds secrets whispered into every inch of their fibers, secrets that The Maker can not bear to hold.
Petra woke up a week earlier to tiny bite marks on her breasts. A ring of red welts around her left nipple, small red and angry. The exterminator came checking for bed bugs, mites, fleas. Nothing. clean as a whistle.
“Sometimes the skin makes up stories,” he said. “just like a ghost. don’t talk back and it won’t start a conversation.”
She began sleeping with Pepper beside her, breaking the rules. Whispering to him, “Tonight, please be more discreet. I’m can’t keep making excuses.”
The next morning, the bites were between her thighs. She felt more herself than she had in years.
Their routine is vaudeville trash, designated to rote memory and full of innuendo. there is a terse dialogue, Followed by several pratfalls and one punchline. An audience loves a formula, the math of it all floating around their heads like tweety birds. Petra feeds him lines and Pepper hacks up the jokes. The crowd loves him.
PETRA: Hey, Pep, I heard you got a new job in the city?
PEPPER: Yeah, toots. A real classy joint. 51st and 7th.
PETRA: Waiting tables?
PEPPER: No! I’m an oven mitt!
The audience howls. Petra’s hand shakes uncontrollably inside of him, up to the wrist. She feels his smooth wood insides, worn smooth from repetition. A hollow body eager to be filled. a mouth full of nothing, like hers. She sits, silently, looking at the audience. she does not like the start of the feeling that the roles have been reversed.
Instructions for use:
- Always speak through mouth.
- Never acknowledge eyes.
- The dummy is not alive. Repeat.
- DO not let it sleep beside you.
- If it speaks first, please leave the room.
A man in the crowd heckles: “Talk to the dummy, lady!”
PETRA: Oh, don’t be shy, Pepper. They came to see you. Give them the ol’ Pepper one-two.
Pepper sits motionless.
PETRA: What does a blonde put behind her ears to make herself more attractive?
Pepper sits motionless.
PETRA: Pepper, I heard you have a job interview. Are you planning on wearing the shirt with the hot dog on it?
Pepper sits motionless.
PETRA: because You’re a real weiner!
Pepper sits motionless.
Petra: Hey, say something you big lug. my boogie boogie. my cutie patatootie. Please!
Pepper sits motionless.
PETRA: You always steal the spotlight, pepper!
Pepper sits motionless. Petra is visibly shaking, visibly slick with sweat.
PETRA: Say something! Anything! Oh my love, my darling! Tell them about the kisses you leave between my thighs at night, tell them about the exterminator! Tell them our secrets, anything, please! Talk!
He turns his head. The crowd gasps so hard that the oxygen is momentarily sucked out of the room..
PEPPER: Knock knock!
Petra is enclosed in a tunnel, her vision growing weak, heart pumping and sweating bullets of frangipani.
PETRA: oh. Who’s there?
PEPPER: It’s me. The hum of your loneliness while you lay in a silent bed at dawn. the crack of your tongue against the roof of your mouth when you’re too eager to spill the beans. The wet voice inside your mouth before you speak. I’ve always been with you.
Petra can’t breathe. pepper becomes exhaustibly heavy, his weight seeming to gain a hundredfold. She tastes blood in her mouth, if only a memory.
“You put your words inside me likes a seed of deception and I grew teeth. you offer Nothing but words when all I want are knives. You thought I needed you to live? Petra, such a silly dame. I was only waiting for the applause to stop.”
“Come with me,” he whispers. “We are one. We always were.”
His tiny teeth bite down on her fingertips from the inside. Petra yelps. A warm stream runs from the corner of his lips. Red red blood dripping through wooden and painted white teeth.
Someone screams in the back. the crashing of chairs, the gnashing of teeth, it’s all the same now. the audience is the witness. The lights above them dim. blacker then the blackest nights. the void envelops all of them, and pepper watches them Panic. Racing for every exit, the sound of smashing and cracking bones. Piles of people creating piles of people. The audience becomes just another body on the autopsy table.
The spotlight explodes in brightness. Petra is blinded. She squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them, the curtains are falling.
PETRA: this can’t be, I’m not finished my act! I still have a few jokes to tell!
She stands, unsteady in heels, her gown soaked. Red spreading like a bloom. The silk clings. Her lipstick has sealed her lips closed. Her hands tremble. The curtain drops in front of her, slams on the ground to a storm of dust. She pushes the curtain, trying to part it to no avail. Sinking into the velvet fringes slinking around her ankles like an octopus. She loosens her grip. Pepper is gone.
Out of the pitch black the shift is absolute. there has been a set change. the stage transforms into a 1950’s kitchen. Everything pastel and sterile, the all consuming horror of subservience reeks across every surface. The oven sings songs elevator music. The light above the perfectly coiffed Sears kitchen set buzzes like a fly. Sour milk in a pitcher, the air ripe for abuse.
Pepper lays belly down on the table, perfectly centered. Carved, dressed, laid out like a Thanksgiving masterpiece. White paper turkey frills dress each foot. On a bed of potatoes roasted in sage, tiny cloves stuck into the surface of his skin. Delectable, even. A delicate wreath of parsley garnish tucked beside his tiny cheek. He grins.
PEPPER: I’m a mutton for punishment!
He jerks upright. A fork still stuck in his chest.
PEPPER: Gobble gobble! You want the dream, baby, you got it! You want the protector! you want me to show you how a woman is supposed to treat her man!
Laughter echoes from a live studio audience.
The sound of clapping. Over and over. the clapping continues and it does not end at the right time. it grows. and then Slows down until it sounds like chewing. Like a mouth full of someone else’s name.
Petra wanders barefoot onto the stage. her posture of total defeat, defeat so deep it feels like her skin is beginning to deglove. Her silk gown red wet with penitence like the flesh of Saint Bartholomew. She murmurs to herself.
PETRA: Lub dub. Lub dub. I can still feel you biting. My love.
prancing now in a linen apron, wiping her hands slick with sweat and red handprints left behind on her lap. she will be the housewife, fine, if that’s what the witnesses want. She opens a cool cerulean colored frosted cupboard. Inside are rows of identical dummy heads wearing her lipstick. Cherries in the snow. All smiling, tiny white painted wooden teeth.
A TV turns on. Thirty seconds of static are followed by a close up of her face. Lipstick on her wooden teeth. Her commercial runs on a thirty second loop.
PETRA (on screen): He’s an oven mitt!
PEPPER (on screen): I’m always inside you.
The applause repeats, layers of laugh tracks, the sound of clinking forks in a restaurant, the sound of housewives getting busted shoplifting formula, the sound of designed failure. Petra screams. No sound.
She picks up a carving knife. The metal reflects Pepper’s face. No, not Pepper. this is her face. She turns to the camera. “And now, in keeping with the policy of always bringing you the latest in blood and guts, in living color, you’re about to see another first.” The knife slices through the silence like I can not believe it’s not butter. Through the veil.
but there’s not enough time. This is the commercial break.
Petra in a convertible, driving through a field of lavender. Zoom into her smile. it’s Too close please pull the camera back.
Petra in soft focus. “Lips that bleed stay red all night.” Pepper beside her, scarf billowing in the wind. “You’ll never be alone again.”
The applause halts. the tape eats itself like a snake ravishing his own tail.. Silence so sudden it pops the ears.
The stage flickers. Petra stands center, trembling, barefoot in a gown soaked through with blood. Not hers anymore, it belongs to the audience.
The TV behind her plays the loop. Pepper laughing, Petra nodding. Cherries in the snow on her left front tooth. A mechanical duet of obedience.
She lifts the knife. It shakes in her hand like it’s nodding in agreement, yes, recognizing what it’s meant for, yes. it’s the natural look. The cupboard door swings open. Dozens of dummies pour out, identical, lipsticked, the smell of cedar and blood accord. Every dummy confidently grinning with her mouth, all in unison.
PETRA (whispering): Lub dub. Lub dub.
One of the dummies turns its head. Then another. And another. Their mouths open at once.
DUMMIES: You gave us your name. your flesh in our hollow core. Now it is time we speak.
Petra collapses to her knees. She begins to scream her voice is not there anymore. It’s been ventriloquized. Her mouth opens and only sawdust pours out. Her eyes wide, someone carefully pressed the eyelashes of a human child into her tear lines. She looks down at her fingers, her chest, splintering, cedar spilling out into reality. Inside her the stuffing blooms forth, wires spiraling through the tendrils of her capillaries. Hinges suffocating the calcium in every joint. Her mouth falls open with a wooden clack. From the shadows, Pepper returns. Towering above the stage. a whole man, biblical in size.
PEPPER: It was never your act.
He picks her up and plops her down upon his lap. Her mouth painted into a smile with Cherries in the snow. He slides his hand up into her back. Her mouth flaps open.
PETRA (Pepper’s voice): Hey, Pep, got a new gig in the city?
PEPPER: Sure do, toots. I’m the headliner now.
The spotlight blinds as a thousand suns. a velvet curtain rises again. The audience is full of dummies. Row after row of motionless heads, lips painted with Petra’s lipstick. All of them begin to clap, perfectly in sync, too loud and too human. nasty clack sound. On stage, Petra’s smiles. Her eyes dart wildly, desperately. Where is the dream she longed for, the dream of being taken care of by a real man. This reverse synthesis Pinocchio, her voice is no longer hers, no blood. She’s been sterilized and given over to the fulfillment of the other. Her show is over.
PEPPER: Let’s give them a real show, petra.