The entries remain unordered as usual, from different periods of her time at the Academy. Questions, comments, guesses welcome. Have at it.

[Joss is boss, River is not mine, etc. ad nauseum, ad infinitum...] Thanks to Bytemite for the beta. __________________________________________________

ENTRY #???? This isn’t for anything, just a short-story exercise. I was thinking of sending it off to Simon, but he hasn’t replied to any of my letters lately, so I’ll postpone it. It’s likely that work at the hospital has increased, and he doesn’t have much time for the musings of a fourteen-year-old sister.

I wondered what it would be like to be one of those girls, the dress-dolls in the window, a hundred street-shifting eyes on you, but not on you. On your dress. A living mannequin is designed to not exist, and yet must draw the eyes of potential customers. I don’t know if I’ve managed to underline the paradox. I think I haven’t.

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"Day Job"---The Life of A "Mannequin" on Persephone Alt. title: "Weltanschauung"

I am a picture in a window-frame. Flawless skin where it can be seen. My hair is as sculpted. Not one of the shadows outside the glass remarks on my eyes, remarks on anything. They won't, if I'm doing my job. They won't know anything at all. I have replaced the machines because here is no art in metal. I show how the fabric moves: we are one motion. Every week I say goodbye to us--to a dress. I remember each of them.

It's a special technique, the 'glass eyes'. We reflect back their faces in my own, their bodies in our dress. Every single one— the art of a million faces. At night, another steps into my alcove, lit fantastically. They are dressed in the night fashions.

They, dress and performer--as we, my own dress and I--are vitally important. Remarkable facility in every facet. I am not allowed to speak of any dress after it disappears. But I can see the layers of each of us even after they're gone; I feel them as we move. It is what draws them to us, the shades before the glass. The movement of intangible beauty that accrues on our limbs, our gestures. That's what makes us experienced. There are few mirrors on Persephone. They draw evil and bad luck. I have been here for seven years. We are their mirrors.

* * *

Window washers are not people. They simply clear the lens, like cleansing the palate. I was a dress that was light, white and gauzy, frilled and slit down the front--mourning wear for the well to do, fine ladies who must bury the dead in the morning, and go on to a soiree in the afternoon. I sleep in a padded recess set into the floor not far from the alcove. These are the same size, so in rest I neither am bruised nor forget what I do. It is pale cushioned silk satin. There is no reason to describe anything else in my place of work. Because it does not change.

That night she was a wine-shard dress, smooth and reflective, ground-down to powder and scattered across the dress. I caught her instructions because I was not asleep and felt tainted. For a moment I forgot my dress--I was jealous. I could feel the layers evaporating, disappearing like smoke, and I panicked. And I could no longer feel my dress---part of me---it slipped away.

Then it was right where I left it---on me. I felt shocked and wondered if she knew. That I saw her. It was an accident, but now I feel distanced from it. Just a space of time, blank. I erased it.

The windows are always cleaned just before the shift. The mannequins change the time, like clockwork. People always come to watch. Always someone on Persephone.

The window washer changed. Makes faces as I go out of sight. A bug on the glass. When will she learn her own insignificance? She knows it, but makes faces anyway. My dress went to a Baroness on Uriah. Didn't ask the price. They never do.

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ENTRY #????

Looked down at my tea bowl yesterday at breakfast and realized something. Ordinary, routine objects and occurrences have so much beauty, and yet we never notice them because they are seen every day:

White porcelain eggshell, Spring green inside Papery teabag sails like a leaf.

More after Physics! :D

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ENTRY #????

It’s like seeing shadows

Slivers of her

Side-by-side

Filled out only by my memory

Rapidly disappearing—

A cheshire smile.

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ENTRY #????

I sit here today and try to explain, but how can I explain through this fog? And who am I explaining it to? It’s all meaningless anyway. Ha ha, that’s Him-on-the-cross, you know. You don’t know I know and I don’t know what I know. [I can even twist my own words.]

I don’t even know that there is an “all”—just bits washed up from the waves. Bits in a bell jar. Shake it up and it makes a lethal snow-globe, all those bright fragments that you can’t touch flying by in an unending stream. They never said the weather could cease to exist. Always talking about it, and then one day it was gone.

I can see her ghostly hands on the table, just that, her hands—in front of me and I’m not sure if the rest of her wanted to be there. Your feet tie you firmly in the ground and your hands, your hands open like pale flowers, just once, to grasp, to have and to hold, but what if it’s taken and everything is emptied away from you? What if you truly never knew what you wanted? I didn’t want to be that girl either, didn’t want to be the smart one any more, just wanted to be given the right to cry like anybody else.

Thus the paradox. Irony trumps pity in the great hierarchy of truth. And my request was denied, by myself, my own nature. My own desire. Where did it go, that fool that got me here?

skin, like ice, like glass inside, all filled, frozen stasis. Salt can do nothing. No tears.

What am I saying? All I can do any more is parrot and rhyme, describing everything. Nothing there inside my head, just my mask moving, mouthing echoes hurtling off the walls, hurting me, bruising me. Shying away from echoes. So proud. I never thought about them before, but now I am. My parents. Your parents would be so proud.

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ENTRY #????

They are playing with the Amygdala—-poor child. None of us really care, and her mother shouldn’t have named her that. With such a name, how can she not be teased in dark alleys? Afraid of the garbage collectors. The cockroaches. Afraid she will wake up one morning like them, with an exoskeleton and nothing else inside.

I am pages in an album, layered together and pressed until they make a girl of letters, a paper daughter. There is carbon in paper, and, given more coaching, I could someday become more than a rough diamond. I need to be cut, and set into my place.

A life in sips or slips—-of these, strong synthesis cannot be made, and Ockham’s blade is become defiled-—with only two hands he cannot possibly handle all these conclusions offered by single, contradictory incidences. This is funny; laugh with me. Humor abounds in the lack of synchronous development or understanding, and life must be split, repeated again, like petals on an ever-blooming tree. I think his now-multiple razors should be named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, come to purge Denmark of the hypocrisy it has skirted for so long. But they are kept on a hempen leash, and are not let out alone.

They run away like sniggering children, these vandals of my soul.