Sometimes I’m doing something completely normal, like casing a check or driving on the highway when all of a sudden I’m alive, completely and utterly. I start to shiver and sweat and all of a sudden it feels like the air is alive and particles of it are tangoing through the spaces in between my hair. It’s the weirdest experience, like suddenly the world is actually only a screen in front of me and it ripples.

A couple of little girls are wearing matching light blue dresses, picked up by an pair of indifferent hurried mothers who never checked to see how well the dresses actually did fit their darlings – Babydoll had already outgrown hers.

They walked over my future gravesite, across from a church I’ve never seen before, and I shivered.

I walk down the street, passing a pretty white-haired teenage girl in a red jumpsuit. So out of place that I turned to speak to her, just to ascertain how real she really was – but already she was gone. I shivered uncontrollably in the street.

The little girls settled on the ground, weaving together flower necklaces.
Dollbaby (I kissed a boy once but I should not have. I will not tell her)
Babydoll (My mommy hurts me sometimes when she is feeling sad I know when this is coming because of the music shes listening to I hate hiding in my room waiting for it to change)
Dollbaby (I will not tell her she is my best friend and her mommy will take her away from me)
Babydoll (I want my flowers to make me look like a princess)

J’ai peur qui je vais mourir aujourd’hui.

The flower necklace rips in half and the stems are too limp to be tied back together. In frustration Babydoll drops hers, runs into the church to cry. Dollbaby watches a car drive by, sees teenage boys lean out to look at her (she’ll be hot when she’s older) (she’s hot now) (sick dumbfuck).

I almost stop shivering. I’m still feeling like my arms will snap off like cheap metal when twisted around too much. Still there remain goosebumps like a dragonfly is caught in my shirt. My muscles involuntarily twitch at sporadic intervals.

A dark poet with a camera bends over a cracked angel. Stepping back onto a plotless patch, he crouches to get a better angle. The sun gets into his eye yet he persists. There is nothing like the perfect shot.

Dollbaby’s plump little body begins to convulse. The muscles vibrate like an artist crosshatching:
quick, violent, even strokes.
The sky feels a little closer, pushing its cold blanket around her shoulders. Pushing herself up, she starts to run to the church, to Babydoll, to Babydoll’s warmth. A car races around a corner and almost hits her, missing by a foot or so. The pediatrician on her cell phone didn’t look back as she raced one-handed back to the hospital. Was that one of her patients back there?

Just as the waitress slips me her phone number with the bill for the coffee, I stop shivering. She notices. “Seems like someone was walking on your grave, huh?” The skirt is a little too shirt. I really don’t think her legs are too good. I will probably call her anyway, unless I come across the beauty in the red jumpsuit again. Which I know I never will. Have I been blessed?
I tell the cute waitress that she’s the one who warmed me up. She laughs, blushes, and turns to walk away in case I will reject her.

Dollbaby falls to the ground of the church, against the mosaic tiles. Where are the angels? Where is Jesus?Why is this happening? All she sees are the bottoms of the pews with sticky bubble gum and a broken necklace with a crushed shining cross on the floor beside her. The air buzzed through her ears and into her shattered skull. She lay there, gently spasming.

The photographer moved over a few feet.

Icky Joe, a boy in Dollbaby’s class, rolled over in his sleep.

I return to the restaurant to get a coffee every day after work. She’s going to come over to my house for Christmas. It was hard for her to get permission from her pediatrician mother to escape family festivities, but she said she worked hard on it for me.

Dollbaby melts into the church floor. No longer shaking, she lay languidly, conforming to the tile.
“Dollbaby, is that you?” Babydoll asks, returning from confession.

Snow falls outside as the poet develops his photographs.

I try to find something fitting for my new girlfriend, who usually wears pants outside of work. I buy her pretty prints from a local art gallery. They depict pretty statues in an old graveyard surrounded by graceful trees.
I expect she’ll say they’re beautiful.

“They’re beautiful,” she says.
In return she gives me a scarf/gloves set, for my chills.

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