Sophie unlocked the door to the house, shaking and chilled as if she were suddenly naked. Why did she feel like an intruder—after all, George had sent her here. Their relationship consisted in little more than kvetching about their jobs in the HR department, chitchat about sports or politics, drinking, and, often near the end of each evening, a bout of ribaldry and good-natured joshing. George scrupulously avoided any intrusion of real intimacy with her, though, and, to her knowledge, with anyone else, as well. This afternoon, however, he had reported for his weekend duty with the National Guard, but he’d forgotten to pack his uniform’s regulation belt; he had called her to pick it up for him since he couldn’t leave the base. She had been to George’s house several times before, often waiting in the kitchen, pregaming a cocktail, as George (always a little vain) readied himself for going out to the bars or wherever they were headed that night. But she had never been inside his bedroom. He had always put her off when she wandered down the hallway, closing the door so that she glimpsed nothing more than a sliver of light beneath the doorframe.
“C’mon, doll, I’ll just be a sec,” he’d say from inside. He could take nearly an hour, though. She liked to pass the time by making specious guesses about what George was doing by the patterns of watery shadows woven on the carpet, the whispery shuffling sounds coming from within.
Venturing into the house, she walked gingerly down the hall, now standing on the threshold, the doorknob in her outstretched grip, about to enter a space she oftentimes imagined flooded with tiny stars that danced off sequined mobiles—a room filled with clepsydras and relics of saints’ bones and scimitars from Mongol princes and ancient gnomons and preserved specimens of rare birds under bell jars and tusks from prehistoric animals and shards from asteroids and scrimshaw inscribed with lost Eddas and the forgotten tools of alchemists: an unsuspected Wunderkammer of marvelous things.
She opened the door. The bedroom looked ordinary enough, if nondescript, almost anonymous. There were no posters or pictures, no decorations in the room except a trifold mirror; his small cot had been tucked with hospital corners; the few books aligned squarely on one small shelf were a bulk set of hardbacks, dull Harvard classics; a single bonsai, twisted into a perfect diagonal, adorned his sturdy, utilitarian desk, which otherwise remained bare.
At the far side of the room, a final door stood shut, the door to his closet. George had given her strict instructions: she was to find the camo duffle on the top right shelf and the belt he needed was zipped in the inside pouch. She opened the closet door to reveal a hanger with his clothes, a vacuum cleaner, and a stack of large boxes above which was the shelf with the duffle. She trembled before the stack of boxes, which she was certain contained something remarkable, something acutely personal, which so much order and outward normalcy kept under wraps. Until now, she had obeyed his instructions. She hadn’t violated his trust.
She could say that she looked in the duffle and didn’t see the belt; she could claim she forgot to open the inside pouch. After all, this was her one chance.
She slid out the boxes, five in all, all of them quite heavy, all of them rattling with various items inside, then spread the boxes around her as she knelt on the floor. She undid the flaps of the largest box. Inside she saw—she didn’t recognize what she saw at first. Then Sophie flinched back, her heart racing. It looked like a body bent double, tangled upon itself in order to be stuffed in, but the skin, if that’s what it was, seemed slightly concave, almost desiccated, smooth and yet lifeless, the downy soft hairs along the arms catching the light, although the flesh seemed too homogenous, too devoid of pulsing blood or muscle. The shriveled carcass slumped, a deadweight, haggard, emaciated, world-worn. How long had it been here? Oh my god, Sophie thought, George is a killer. He’s a soldier, and a soldier is a type of trained killer. This is what he’s been hiding. It’s been so obvious! Why didn’t I see it before? But even as she had these thoughts, a rueful smile curled the corners of her lips.
But no, unfolding the body and examining it closer, she realized the skin was indeed artificial. It was some sort of elaborate automaton. Or, more precisely: a sex doll. Though disappointed it wasn’t a real body, Sophie was still intrigued enough with her discovery. She wanted to figure out how it worked. The doll appeared to have a flexible vertebrae and a ligature of joints that gave it a pliant ability to bend and contort. Moreover, and stranger yet, the genitalia itself were absent. In their place yawned an empty, mechanical socket. Perhaps this was all part of the kink?
As she lugged the body up out of the box, she felt it had been supplied with a coil of viscera and internal organs that jostled within, though the whole mass sagged, sadly deflated. An intuition struck her, and, looking up again, she recognized that the object she had at first glance mistaken for a vacuum cleaner was actually an air pump. A search of the doll revealed an orifice concealed below a crevice of skin above the socket. She slid her fingers inside the crevice and felt a connecting hose, which she then hooked up to the pump, twisting the valve and turning on the motor. The whole body reverberated as the air rushed in; the emaciated creases and furrows slowly began filling out to more voluptuous proportions. The doll had come to life.
While the doll inflated, Sophie opened the other boxes. One box contained an assortment of differently molded phalluses and vaginal clefts and double phalluses along with buttholes and scrotal pouches and nubbly protuberances and rubbery gadgets that looked like cuttlefish or worm-eaten encephalons; a whole menagerie of biomorphic attachments, some with fronds and others with cilia and flippers, canals and spadices, voids and ventricles, one in the likeness of a man-eating flower, another like a scope of an alien surgeon jumbled about helter-skelter. George wouldn’t have instructed me to go into his closet if he didn’t expect me—didn’t want me—to discover his collection of toys, Sophie reasoned. This must have been his plan all along, that devil; he knew I couldn’t resist the urge to snoop around just a little. I mean, jeez, who could?
Other boxes contained outfits and wigs, make up, whips, paddles, chains and clamps, creams and jellies. Sophie took off her own clothes as she dressed up the figurine in a shirt she took from George’s closet. She affixed a wig that resembled George’s short-cropped, wavy black locks. She inserted a small, almost egg-shaped, urchin-like outgrowth into the socket. She dipped two fingers into an old Ball jar and smeared the attachment with some viscid petroleum substance that made it twinkle with a translucent sheen. As her clit balanced upon the vibratory bud, the motoring hum of the pump undulated the entire form. She thought about how George’s germs had infested the doll, delectating in the juicy thoughts of his semen and mucus and saliva and slime, the spell of everything held within the watery complex beneath the derma that merged and swirled, that spilled and intermingled.
Straddling the doll, which rippled, which swelled with a quivering pulse, Sophie lost herself in a private darkness. The thighs, the breasts, the whole flaccid mechanism became plump and firm. Soon, it began shifting, the air pressure stiffening its limbs, even as Sophie rode the waves of its juddering life-force. Sophie arched back, urgently pressing into the knob, yielding to its hypnotic, riveting lilt. The giving plastic seemed to push out, timorously meeting her, melding into her contours. Before long, the doll’s belly stretched, its neck swelled, its eyes bulged; its indifferent smile warped and widened into a gaping silent scream—ballooning up, it hissed and bubbled around the vibratory bud screwed in its socket, producing little snorts and farts. It engorged into a monstrous, deformed creampuff, lifting Sophie higher and still higher on its trembling crest.
Then something slapped Sophie’s face, hard. She fell with a sudden jolt. Her whole being began shaking, gushing, throbbing: electric waves of pleasure coruscated through her every inch until she collapsed like a marionette, disjointed, utterly spent. She opened her eyes. She saw herself in triplicate, three images, three other naked women in the mirror but each one slightly different, each one mocking, and she was none of them. A tremor of repulsion wormed through her exhausted nerves and tissue. The doll, the effigy, had burst. It had popped all at once, simultaneously on every side, a vast and total explosion. Pieces of its skin, scraps of fabric, parts of its viscera, and whatever paste—bile or spleen—had resided in its organs had spattered across the room, now dripped off the ceiling.
The surrogate’s spine, a scaffolding of bones and tendons oddly smaller than the fleshy body it supported, a surprising miniature like the skull of an owl, still sprawled on the floor. It reminded Sophie that a skeleton already twisted inside her own body, too. The doll’s ribs and pelvic bowl, its vertebrae like a macabre chandelier covered in a glistening afterbirth, this lanky stillborn idol—she took it up in her arms like an infant, kissed it, caressed it as if she recognized it for her very own orphaned love-child, and left, drenched and shivering, without throwing on any clothes.
Will Cordeiro‘s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Birdfeast, DIAGRAM, New Madrid, Souvenir, Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Flagstaff, where he is a faculty member in the Honors Program at Northern Arizona University.
