I dressed the mannequins on the fourth floor.
They are flat cutouts of polished wood with no faces. As of right now I have not named them. I do not have physical ownership of them, but they are mine.
They know me now.
I spent time up there during my lunch break on Sunday. No one comes in on Sundays. I dressed them with the only clothes available to me; the cutouts are donned in brightly-colored bicycle shop shirts and skin-tight spandex cycling shorts that hang loose around their femur-sized legs. No flesh and no muscle. Only hard and shapely wooden bone.
I did not speak to them. I communicated with my eyes and they with their silence. They knew why I was really up there, why I put the dusty snorkeling goggles on the large one's face that I found behind a dented cardboard box of used children's helmets. I was watching your window when I taped the pinwheel in the child's hand. My legs were swinging off the edge of the attic into the stairwell when I watched you open your crimson drapes.
The stairs lead right down toward the window that opens into the space above the narrow alley between the massive back of the shop and the rest of the downtown strip. Often on my way up to the fourth floor to hide I can smell onion rings and burgers wafting up from below. There are shouts from across the street and the little children that I am supposed to be catering to downstairs are crying. I can see the blue sky that is sometimes grey and feel the wind if there is any.
But most of all I can see your crimson drapes.
They are the portal into the tiny space above Stubby's where you reside by yourself.
When they open I can see your crisp white sheets, tangled in with the threadbare yellow blanket.
You are beautiful.
You were sick today and you slept. You kept your drapes open to let the breeze in. The mannequins and I watched, though it was hard for them to see over the lip of the attic floorboards that drop off onto the stairwell. But they did not ask me about you and I appreciated their silence.
You breathed in rhythm with the wind.