Molting
Dolly traces a finger from the crown of her head down to her navel, then slips out of her skin like a snake. The DJ stops the music, but Dolly sways and spins, she rattles her bones. Shakes them until her organs come loose and the men’s jeering fades to stunned silence. I watch from behind the bar as her heart drops to the stage, still beating.
Tomorrow people will ask me if I saw the signs, and I guess I did, but I won’t tell them about Dolly’s eyes. Dark wells full of trouble, black pools of fathomless sorrow. Girls come through here tough as nails or sweet as honey, but Dolly is neither. She is a photograph from another century, she is a message written in invisible ink.
Last night before she went on, Dolly sat down at the bar beside one of the regulars. I poured her a drink and she told me girls like us need to stick together. Asked me if I ever felt like I was being pulled in a million directions, like no matter how much I give, it’s never enough. I nodded, thinking about all the people we have to be, all the ways we have to act, just to get by. Dolly downed the shot and walked away, ethereal on stilettos. The regular said she was just another typical sad girl, so I picked up his mug of beer and threw it in his face.
Dolly could’ve been Odette in Swan Lake at some grand theater, but due to a fractured ankle at the exact wrong moment she’s here in this dive writhing around in next-to-nothing for small bills from lonely men. She could’ve been the president of the PTA, handing out exquisite cupcakes at a school fundraiser but when the cops showed up after her boyfriend threw her around they found his drugs in her apartment, so they took her son away.
Tonight Dolly hadn’t said a word, only looked at me with a gaze that shattered my insides before she stepped into the spotlight. Now the men are moving back in a herd, frightened of her beckoning phalanges. They no longer want anything more from her, no longer want to eat her alive. She raises her arm and I remember the names of the bones, humerus, radius, ulna. I could’ve been a nurse, but I dropped out of school to take care of my baby brother after our dad flew the coop. Dolly plies, femur and fibula bending at the knee. She pirouettes and collapses, a heap of bones. I trace a fingernail over my clavicle, hook a thumb under my ribcage.
Sara Dobbie is a Canadian writer from Southern Ontario. Her stories have appeared in Milk Candy Review, Fictive Dream, JMWW, Sage Cigarettes, New World Writing, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Ruminate Online, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook "Static Disruption" is available from Alien Buddha Press. Her collection "Flight Instinct" is available from ELJ Editions. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie, and on Instagram at @sbdobwrites.