Dr. Mannequin

I awake as if from nothing. Her name tag reads: Dr. Mannequin, ID 39942, Humanopathy, Inverse Reconstruction. She tells me the car accident was quite devastating. Only metal shaped as random vowels survived. She asks me what I remember about the crash. I tell her I remember the stop sign and then everything stopped. "And before that?" she asks. I tell her there are flashbacks of street corners, a woman stripping for me in a funeral home after her husband poisoned himself, a little boy lost in a kitchen where love was bottled in jugs, a sale at Topshop every other week. "Nice," she says, giving a stiff nod or two.

I ask her if everyone in this hospital is a mannequin like her. She says, "Everyone except the patients." She writes something down on a yellow pad. Her motions are stilted and slowed. She asks me if I feel any sensation. "Like what?" I ask. "Like cold", she says, "Are your feet cold?" I tell her that I can't feel them at all.

She writes something else down. "Can you feel your lips moving when you talk?" she asks. "No," I say, "I don't feel the. How can my lips not move when I talk?" She replies without emotion, like a machine, "Some victims have the sensation of phantom parts--I was just testing. Here, we call missing parts--possibilities." I explain that I don't understand, and I ask her to bring me a mirror.

She holds one proximal to where my face is a possibility. In it, I don't see anything at all. I tell her, "Dr., there is nothing there." She pauses, then replies slowly, "Yes, the accident erased so much. Some of your

body parts were donated to the Mannequin School of Lab Research." "Without my permission?" I ask. "It's a Mannequin- owned hospital," she says in a soft tone. "We tried grafting your thoughts to a CPR doll. It didn't take. The rest of you is now a memory trying to recover itself."