Dummy

It had taken Richard months to get hold of precisely the right kind of tailor’s model.  There were so many to choose from, articulated, semi-articulated, ethnic, short, tall, thin or very thin.  Finally, after prolonged negotiations on the maker’s website and with his bank’s overseas department, Euridice had arrived, extremely well packaged in an excitingly large cardboard box, with efficient German documentation in a transparent pochette stuck to the upper side of her stout container, flanked by This Way Up Bitte! and Fragile!!!

After a few weeks of what Richard came to call The Grand Charade, he realised it was taking far too long every morning to get Euridice prepared in her elaborate dress, complete with long blonde wig, painstaking makeup, Ferlinghetti shoes and French stockings.  So he took to wheeling her out in a tatty old dressing-gown at coffee time, just before Anna was due to pass by.  Every day the same scene, Anna walking along on the other side of the road, with barely a covert glance, pretending complete indifference as always.

Until today.  Richard was good with gait-analysis – after all, that had been his Honours PhD subject – and he knew immediately that his strategy was beginning to work.  Anna’s stride was shorter, more uncertain, maybe a little annoyed.  Two paces more along the street, and there could be no doubt.  Anna was powerfully, extraordinarily angry.  Success!  … but perhaps, he reflected, today would have been a good day for one of his carefully calculated periodic absences from this little mise-en-scène?  After all, even if Euridice couldn’t walk or talk, she was quite engaging company, especially when she was in the mood to model lingerie upstairs….

Anna crossed the street towards him, and he was able to read her face now, rather than merely the language of her stride.  As she pulled the 9mm Mauser automatic from her handbag, through the chaotic veil of emotions he could see her intentions with crystal clarity:  a spectrum from jealousy to white-hot anger, and, as Richard discerned too late but with urgent intensity, murder and imminent death.  Suddenly he understood which of them he loved more.

The gun spoke.  Three brief, imperious, barking commands:  Die – Die – Die!

Euridice toppled backwards, limbs akimbo on the gravel.

“Darling!”  he murmured.

© Donnie Ross 2011

This story first published in Anneke Klein's Rammenas Flash Fiction 2011