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Animating
the Mannequins
By Rebecca Holder, age 17
He
stood in front of the rows of glassy blank faces, cleared his throat,
ran his hand through gelled blond hair and began. His arms waving
at points – expressing and emphasising the words, the mannequins
dressed in designer clothes staring.
“Fact!”
He declared, with a flick of a lightly tanned hand, “Is a lot
stranger than fiction!”
One
or two painted eyebrows slowly rose.
“And
I, will prove this to you!”
So
he continued, highlighting a true tale about an Italian lady who
gave birth to sixty-three children in twenty-seven separate pregnancies,
then one about three passenger ferries on different occasions sinking,
the sole survivor being a man, each one different, but each bearing
the same name.
“So!!”
He yelled, making the mannequins jump in surprise, “Isn't the
story of Jesus an example of this?!”
At
that moment, glassy stares slipped over, they had heard enough about
Jesus, a few shrugged that ‘they guess' stranger things had
happened.
The
young man, suddenly noticing that he was losing them, raised his
voice even further – his arms flapping. “And! If Jesus
was born today, what would he get?!”
“...?”
Commented the rows of shop window dolls, now that the interesting
stories were obviously over, sinking into a stupor.
One
track-suited creature raised an arm, slowly, lazily. “A TV
crew!! Reality TV!!” It barked.
The
assembled nodded at each other and started to mutter about ‘Big
Brother' while the man looked on in vain as this new deity consumed
their thoughts. Another arm was raised and, now desperate, the blond
man smiled hopefully at the perfectly painted features peering up
at him.
“I
don't think so. If a woman believed she was going to give birth
to the son of God now there would not be a TV crew... or even the
best doctors,” her high soft voice rang clearly through the
hall now, the plastic heads absorbing all, “She would be sent
to some sort of home, and the baby put up for adoption. There may
be already another Jesus with a foster family, badly behaved and
on some kind-of drug for thinking God talks to him. In fact, I think
its been done... if there was a God, and now God has given up...
nothing can get through to us now, well, nothing like that anyway.”
Another
blank-stared doll nodded. “Yeah, if he was on TV like, it'd
be boring, creepy religious people don't make good viewing. Especially
without explosions... war... guns... you know?”
The
assembled mannequins blinked in unison at the man, whose eyes were
wide and had taken two steps back from the podium. His carefully
crafted notes, done out of love, lay scattered all over the shining
wooden floor.
Smirking,
the moulded creatures tilted their heads to one side, their almost
identical haircuts in the fashion of the time. Only varying from
girl to boy, moulding perfectly with their perfect heads.
Then,
in rows, stood up and slowly walked out of the hall to their lessons.
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