Closet Rules

By Avra Margariti

The first rule of sex doll club is,
you get used to getting used.
The second rule is,
you will be forgotten by your human
before your super-realistic, horsehair-eyelash, colored-glass eyes
can blink.

And blink we did. Here in the storage closet:
slumped, folded, no longer expected to perform.
The darkness a reminder of the factory we once lived in,
the ship that ferried us in foam-stuffed crates
laid side-by-side, coffin-shaped twin beds for me and you.
Air runs out, yet our decorative lungs breathe at last.
Here, dust and lavender—a safe smell, don’t you think?

The coats and furs overhead don’t carry his scent
(small mercies, small mercies)
but that of a woman long gone.
Did he make us in her likeness, I wonder, face, hair, body selected
from a never-ending online catalogue?
Were her eyes the blue of our eyes,
her skin the cream of our skin, our bodies incapable of bruises
whereas hers would have bloomed black and blue
with how roughly it was handled?
We are silicon smoothness, us.
We are cornsilk hair and peach lips cracked open by bare hands.
Everything or nothing like her;
no matter the answer, now we, too, are forgotten.
(The second rule of sex doll club—
yes, yes, we remember.)

He used to arrange us across the coffee table
bed kitchen island carpet hanging from the chandelier, once.
Were you ever envious of the attention he was pouring
on me, and not on you?
You can tell me, I won’t ever judge you for it.
Did you ever feel like peeling your skin
right off your lightweight, hollow bones?
In the dusk of his bedroom where we flanked him in sleep,
two curled apostrophes facing each other over the bulk of him,
did you ever feel love drifting in the still air?
It was me.
I was trying to learn how to love myself
and accidentally encompassed you in the process.

This is no accident now, in the soothing bluedark,
no product of etiquette or factory settings,
a different function than the one we were made for.
We were never a she or he or singular they
but a possessive his, a sibilant hiss.
So I say, and forgive me if I’m being too forward,
why don’t we call ourselves an I, an each other’s?
Here, you can lean on my shoulder if you’d like,
stretch a bit until your precious head slots against my collarbone.
You can move fast or slow, or stay as you are.

It’s easy to forget sometimes
(believe me, I know)
but the only rule of the storage closet
is agency, is choice.

Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge Literary, Longleaf Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction. You can find her on twitter @avramargariti.

Photo by Daniel Clay on Unsplash.