The Price of Perfection

         She seemed like a normal girl.
         Unfortunately, she had a tendency to hide her feelings beneath a smile, behind a closed door, behind the curtains of a changing room where she now stood. All those bottled up feelings, which had mutated into uncontrollable impulses long ago, often haunted her thoughts and devoured the little amount of values she had left.
         Even more unfortunately, nobody attempted to stop her lethargic process of self-destruction. Nobody noticed her meals growing smaller, her clothes baggier, her self-esteem lower, her thoughts shallower and darker. Nobody stopped her from snatching a kid’s sized shirt, rushing into the fitting room, and grunting in frustration once it wouldn’t fit.
         But who was to blame? Nobody ever knew. Nobody knew how long it had been since she’d eaten properly. How dizzy she felt at that moment. How much she yearned to be what her twisted mind considered beautiful, how far she’d go to achieve that goal.
         As her vision began to blur, she ignored the shaking that spread through her limbs and told herself how ugly, incompetent and hopeless she was. How she’d never be pretty if she always gave in to temptation. How she’d leave everything behind, but had yet to prove her willpower.
         Her vision left her, but the voices inside her head remained.
                   
         The worker spotted the mannequin on the floor, confused by its location and by its unusual veneer. A collector would’ve easily identified it as a ball joint doll, probably manufactured in Asia, but, to the worker’s callow eyes, it was an obstacle for her customers only worthy of the store’s unkempt attic.
         Its glass eyes were inanimate – after all, they couldn’t see a thing – but its ears were tuned into a whispering voice, unperceivable to the worker’s ears, who had assumed that the doll was as lifeless as its eyes had come to show.

Chapter 1

         The room was strange to him.
         His throbbing headache and blurry vision confirmed the events of last night. A groan scratched his dry throat as his bloodshot eyes met a mirror, disappointed by the little they could see behind his shaggy bangs. His dress shirt, the only one he had been able to buy for the last couple of years, was tucked in, yet, unbuttoned down to his belt. A beige stain covered part of his left shoulder, spreading down to his rib cage.
         He tried to grasp the short blurs of reality his memory had kept from last night. Before the bar, which was the last place he could remember, there had been a restaurant. A nice one, too, where he’d lost about two hundred dollars worth of escargot and the only woman he’d ever had the courage to ask out.
         After years of learning to cope with a drink or ten, he’d also learned that moping wasn’t worth it anymore. He knew he was at rock bottom, and overthinking the situation wouldn’t change it. Not that he would try to change things, anyway.
         He was surprised at how familiar his surroundings seemed. He’d waken up in this same room a couple of years ago, when his business had been flourishing and he’d decided to celebrate at the bar next door. The roof was still slanted towards the grubby window, which provided just enough sunlight to expose about a dozen boxes filled to the brim with clothes, shoes and sewing materials.
         As his eyes met its glass ones, his heart raced for a moment, in the silly conviction that it was staring at him. To him, it seemed almost deformed, with its goggly eyes and nearly white hair. Its paltry nose and lips were almost imperceptible, and glowed with the rest of its pale skin. He chuckled at his own foolishness before making his way towards the cleaved door, letting worries of the future seep into his mind once again.
         It slammed shut, cutting his breath short, and he choked up at the sight of a ghastly hand stretching from an arm about an inch from his right ear. As if being suddenly lightheaded wasn’t enough, he felt as if his organs were trying to escape through his mouth.
         Turning around, a cold paralysis penetrated his bones and engulfed his lungs and stomach. He couldn’t even breathe properly at the sight of its deep glass eyes, just the right size and depth to envelop a person’s soul. Her oddly disproportional face was demonic, as if a sculptor cupped a beautiful, innocent face and brought her chin closer to her nose, stretching her eye sockets open.
         He already feared his death (or rather, wished for it at that moment), but he couldn’t contain his panic once she fixed her eyes into his, as a predator would gaze at its prey, and uttered a low, growling whisper:
         “You.”
         An abrupt reflex triggered his attempt of flight, but he was limited to the walls that slowly pushed him closer to the monster. They stopped him at every turn, forcing his wavering feet to stumble away and into the next wall. Soon, his misguided path led to the thing itself, and the terror began gnawing at his sanity.
         Fleeing only felt like a way to delay his torturous end. Her eyes simply followed his desperate sprint, patiently waiting for him to become far too exhausted to struggle within her fatal grip.

(to be continued)