The air in the Doll Market was thick with the scent of ozone and something vaguely metallic, like freshly minted coins or blood on a cold blade. It wasn't a physical place, not really, but in my mind, it hummed with a spectral energy. They stood there, the dolls, each one a facet of her I’d dissected, cataloged, and meticulously arranged.
"If I look at her the way she doesn't want to be seen," the thought echoed, a low murmur among the hushed whispers of the market. And she was here, of course, reduced to these exquisite, unsettling simulacra. The 'Horny Girl' doll, her porcelain skin gleaming under an invisible spotlight, pulsed with a faint heat. I’d sculpted her during those weeks I’d watched her, acutely aware of the shift in her gait, the subtle flush in her cheeks, the way her eyes lingered a fraction too long on certain men. Increased libido and physical changes are normal and linked to hormonal fluctuations. The clinical explanation was cold, sterile, yet the doll radiated a potent, unignorable allure. I'd crafted her from the raw data of her existence, from the way her laugh changed pitch, from the almost imperceptible swell of her lips.
"I think I'm somewhere I shouldn't be," I mused, my gaze drifting over the collection. The 'Tormented' doll, a more recent addition, sat hunched, her tiny hands clutched over an empty space where a heart should be. She was the one who whispered, Being tormented by someone. Was it me? Was I the tormentor, or merely the observer who captured her anguish?
And then I saw her again, not as a doll, but as the real woman, projected onto the shimmering wall of my mental market. Her eyes, those beautiful, dangerous eyes, met mine. "And what if my mind is where you should be?" she challenged, her voice a silken thread unspooling directly into my consciousness. "If you can be in my mind in a way you couldn't be anywhere else."
A jolt went through me, like a misfired round. My mental workshop, usually so controlled, flickered. A Beginner's Guide to Reloading Your Own Ammo and NOT Making It Explode. The irony wasn't lost on me. I was reloading the ammunition of my obsession, each thought a carefully measured grain of powder.
"I'll never manage to bridge the gap you created between us, will I?" The words were mine, but they felt foreign, an unwelcome intrusion into my meticulously constructed world.
"If you undo it, you'll ruin it too," she countered, her image shimmering. Was she talking about the gap, or about my elaborate mental construct? My mind? The Doll Market itself?
She was right. Every doll was perfect in its frozen, observed state. To "undo" one, to touch it with the messy reality of her actual, living self, would be to shatter the illusion. And yet, the desire to bridge that gap, to escape this internal market, was a growing, almost unbearable pressure. Like a pistol magazine, full of bullets, ready to be fired. But at whom? And what would be left if I pulled the trigger?