Mannequin Envy: Materials Management

I'm dangling from a skyscraper 82 stories up. What happened was I had this fixed idea for weeks about testing to see if falling is much different than waiting for no one. Who was it that once said Everything that happens in life happens at once? This means that we all suffer from horizontal impairment and non-linear amnesia. We are all in denial about having already seen ourselves as repeats of others. Good angels crash from boredom. The world does not catch up or make progress; it is no Areion with both hooves and human feet.

Now what's keeping me from falling too soon is a mannequin. But who or what is holding the mannequin? Is its leg stuck between ledges? Perhaps the woman who constructed her in her own image is holding her to save face. And who or what is securing the woman? A man with a concrete desire for backwards motion? What sequential failures! The mannequin's arm is starting to rip at the elbow. By the time I hit rock bottom, thoughts spilling out of my head and hitting innocent pedestrians like their memories of rare stolen coins, they will have invented a new type of plastic, a much stronger kind, made from spooled memory and human sweat glands.

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Kyle Hemmings has art work in The Stray Branch, Euphenism, Uppagus, The Bitchin' Kitsch, Black Market Lit, and upcoming work in Convergence. He loves pre-punk garage bands of the '60s, Manga comics, and urban photography/art.