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2024-11-23T23:25:26.136791Z

Worlds, endless and strange. Strung together like Docker containers. Realities stacked in orderly chaos, yet easily breached. One moment, I stood in a realm I almost understood. The next — was ripped away, flung into another — jarring, grotesque, and utterly alien.

I was a mannequin. I was a mannequin named Jack. Drugs addict, lunatic, a madman, who fought his demons for so long that became one of them.. A plastic shell stitched together with thread by a talking rat. The thread was long, connecting the rat to me, like a tether. As the needle pierced my leg, my stomach, my chest, the rat spoke with calm assurance:

“I know what I’m doing. Trust me — I’m an expert.”

The rat had a mission, and by extension, so did I. Together, we were to leap from the roof of a decrepit church at some unseen signal. The rat promised its tail would steady the fall, and we wouldn’t crash. It seemed ridiculous, but ridiculousness had no place here.

We waited. From our perch, we signaled to another pair — a squirrel and a shattered doll with a broken arm and a missing eye. The squirrel chittered back, and for a moment, the message seemed to change direction. But then the signal was ours again.

The rat hesitated. It glanced back, doubt flickering across its beady eyes. I, however, had no such hesitation.

Like the fool I was — plastic or not — I pushed the rat off the edge and hurled myself after it.

The thread unraveled as I fell, snapping away from my leg, stomach, and chest. The detachment burned, as though it was pulling something essential from me. I tumbled, back-first, the world spinning above, then below. Dumb music, nonsensical and upbeat, blared somewhere in the ether.

In that moment, I felt elation. The kind of euphoria that only comes with absolute surrender to a cause, no matter how absurd.

But then the voice came — disembodied and cold, like a narrator observing from beyond the dream.

“And so, drug addict Jack plummeted to his death, blissfully unaware of the futility of it all.”

The impact came hard, body meeting pavement in a sickening thud. I rolled down a gentle slope, plastic scraping against stone. For the briefest moment, I thought, Was this a mistake?

Then came the calm. Joy bloomed, inexplicable but consuming. A smile spread across my face — Jack’s face. “Nah,” I whispered, “just nonsense.”

And then… darkness.

I was ejected from the dream, tossed into another reality like a plastic doll discarded on a factory floor.

But as I woke, one question lingered: Was I ever really plastic?

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Kai Lass (@kaiber)

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