If that next bullet has your name on it.

 

 

 Her face crowded with victims and criminals, black and white,

 

 Director Denial says, “You might die for welfare queens . . .”

 

 Or drag queens.

 

 For folks who hate you, or folks who’d call you a hero.

 

 You don’t get to discriminate when your number comes up.

 

 

 “And if you’re really stupid,” Director Denial says, “you die still hoping.”

 

 You made the world just a little bit better place.

 

 And maybe, just maybe, your death

 

 will be the last.

 

  

 

 Exodus

 

 A Story by Director Denial

 

 Please understand.

 

 Nobody here is defending what Cora did.

 

 Maybe two years ago was the only time anything like this had ever happened. Spring and fall, the county staff has to take a refresher in mouth-to-mouth. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Each group meets in the health room to practice heart massage on the dummy. They partner up, the agency director pumping the chest, the other person kneeling down, pinching the nose shut, and blowing air into the mouth. The dummy is a Breather Betty model, just a torso with a head. No arms or legs. Rubbery blue lips. Eyes molded open, staring. Green eyes. Still, whoever makes these dummies, they glued long eyelashes on her. They glued on a glamour-girl wig, the red hair so smooth you don’t feel your fingers combing it until someone else says, “Easy there . . .”

 

 While she knelt next to the dummy and spread her red-painted fingernails against its chest, the agency director, Director Sedlak, said how all Breather Betty dolls are molded from the death mask of a single French girl.

 

 “True story,” she told the group of them.

 

 This face on the floor, it’s the face of a suicide pulled from the water over a century ago. Those same blue lips. The same staring dull eyes. All Breather Betty dolls are molded from the face of this same young woman who threw herself into the Seine River.

 

 If the girl died because of love or loneliness, we’ll never find out. But police detectives used plaster to cast a mask of her dead face, to help find her name, and decades later a toymaker owned that death mask and used it to cast the face of the first Breather Betty.

 

 Despite the risk that somebody in a school or factory or Army unit might someday lean down and recognize the long-dead body of their sister, mother, daughter, wife, this exact dead girl is kissed by millions of people. For generations, millions of strangers have pressed their mouths over hers, those lips her exact drowned lips. For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman.

 

 This woman who just wanted to die.

 

 The girl who turned herself into an object.

 

 Nobody said that last part. But nobody had to say it.

 

 So, last year, Cora Reynolds was in a group that goes to the health room and takes the Breather Betty out of her blue plastic suitcase. They lay her out on the linoleum tile. Swab her mouth with hydrogen peroxide. It’s standard hygiene procedure. Another county policy. Director Sedlak bends to put both her palms on the middle of Betty’s chest. On her sternum. Someone kneels close to pinch Betty’s nose. The director shoves down on the plastic chest. And the kneeling guy, with his mouth on Betty’s rubber mouth, he starts to cough.

 

 He leans back, coughing, sitting on his heels. Then he spits. Splat, there on the health-room linoleum tile, he spits. The mouth guy wipes the back of one hand across his lips and says, “Damn, that stinks.”

 

 The people crowded around, Cora Reynolds among them, the rest of the class, they lean closer.

 

 Still squatting there, the mouth guy says, “There’s something inside her.” He covers his mouth and nose with one cupped hand. His face twisted sideways, away from the rubber mouth but still watching it, he says, “Go ahead. Hit her, again. Hit her hard.”

 

 The director, bent over with the heels of both hands on Betty’s chest, her fingernails painted dark red, she shoves down.

 

 And a fat bubble swells between Betty’s blue rubber lips. Some liquid, some salad dressing, thin and milky white, the bubble swells big. A greasy gray pearl. Then a Ping-Pong ball. A baseball. Until it pops. Spattering the greasy off-white soup everywhere. This thin, watery culture, puffing a cloud of stink into the room.

 

 Until that day, anybody could use the Health Room. Lock the door. Unfold the rollaway cot and take a nap during their lunch hour. If they got a headache. Or cramps. The first-aid kit, that’s where they’d find it. All the bandages and aspirin. You didn’t need anybody’s permission. All that’s in there is the rollaway cot, a little cabinet with a metal sink for hand-washing, a switch on the wall for the light. The blue plastic suitcase that Breather Betty comes in, it has no lock.

 

 The group, they roll the dummy onto her side, and from the corner of her soft rubber mouth, first a drip, drip, drip, then a thin stream of creamy gruel runs out. Some of the watery mess washes down her pink rubber cheek. Some of it webs between her lips and plastic teeth. Most of it pools on the linoleum tile.

 

 This dummy, now a French person. A girl who drowned. A victim of herself.

 

 Everyone standing there, breathing behind a cupped hand or a handkerchief. Blinking back the smell that makes their eyes water. Their throats slide up and down inside their neck skin as they swallow and swallow to keep their scrambled eggs and bacon and coffee and oatmeal with skim milk and peach yogurt and English muffins and cottage cheese down, deep in their gut.

 

 The mouth guy grabs the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and throws his head back. Dumping a double swig into his mouth, he puffs his cheeks. He stares at the ceiling, eyes closed, mouth open, gargling the peroxide. Then he snaps forward to spit his mouthful into the little metal sink.

 

 The room, everybody breathing the laundry-bleach smell of the peroxide, underneath that the toilet smell from the Breather Betty’s lungs. The director, she says for somebody to grab a sex-crime investigation kit. The swabs and slides and gloves.

 

 Cora Reynolds, she was among that group, standing so close that she tracked some of the slippery muck all the way back to her desk. It’s after that day County Facilities put a lock on the door and gave Cora the key. Since then, you get cramps and you put your name on a list, with the date and time, before you get that key. You get a headache, and you ask Cora for two aspirin.

 

 The team at the state labs, when they got the swabs and they ran the slides and cultures, they asked: Was this a joke?

 

 Yeah, the lab team said, the ooze was sperm. Some of it maybe six months old. Dating back to the last mouth-to-mouth class session. But, hey, there was so much of it. Besides, running it for DNA, the genetic signifiers showed this was the work of twelve, maybe fifteen different men.

 

 The county guys on this end, they said, Yeah. A bad joke. Now forget it.

 

 This is just what human beings do—turn objects into people, people into objects.

 

 Nobody’s saying it’s the county team that screwed up. Screwed up big-time.

 

 The Breather Betty dummy, it’s no surprise Cora took it home. Rinsed out its lungs, somehow. Washed and set its red glamour-girl hair. Cora bought a new dress for its armless, legless torso. A string of fake pearls for around its neck. Anything that helpless, Cora could never just toss in the garbage. She put lipstick on its blue lips. Mascara on its long eyelashes. Blush. Perfume—a lot of perfume, to cover the smell. Some nice clip-on earrings. It would amaze nobody to find out she spent every night sitting on the sofa in her apartment, watching the television and chatting at it.

 

 Just Cora and Betty. Chatting in French.

 

 Still, nobody’s calling Cora Reynolds a crackpot. Maybe just a soft touch.

 

 County policy says they should’ve bagged the old dummy in black plastic and heaved it onto a top shelf in the evidence room. Forgetting her there.Betty,not Cora. Abandoned. Fermenting. Ignored with the numbered bags of dope and coke. The vials of crack and heroin balloons. All the guns and knives waiting to appear in some courtroom. All the seized baggies and balloons shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, until there’s just enough left for a felony conviction. All those objects, used.

 

 But, no, they broke the rules. They let Cora take the old dummy home.

 

 Nobody wanted her to grow old alone.

 

 Cora. She was the kind of person, she couldn’t buy just one stuffed animal. Part of her job description was to buy a stuffed toy for each kid who came in to give a statement. Each kid taken into custody by the court. Any kid pulled for neglect and placed in a foster home. At the toy store, Cora would take one little plush monkey out of a bin full of animals . . . but it would look so alone in her shopping cart. So she’d choose a furry giraffe to keep it company. Then a stuffed elephant. A hippo. An owl. At some point, there would be more animals in her shopping cart than in the display bin. And the animals left behind each had an eye missing, an ear frayed, a seam split open. Stuffing poked out. These were the animals no one would want.

 

 Nobody felt how Cora’s heart dropped off a cliff at that moment. That long fall from the tip-top of the world’s tallest rollercoaster, that feeling left Cora just skin. Just a skin tube with a tight hole at each end. An object.

 

 Those little tigers smudged with dirt, trailing loose threads. The stuffed reindeers crushed flat. They filled her apartment, those torn pandas and stained little owls and Breather Betty. Just a different type of evidence room.

 

 It’s what human beings do . . .

 

 But poor, poor Cora. Now she’s trying to cut off people’s tongues. To infect them with parasites. Obstruct justice. She’s stealing public property. Nobody’s talking about misappropriation of office supplies: pens, staplers, copy paper.

 

 It’s Cora who orders the office supplies. She collects everyone’s time card on Friday. She hands out the paychecks on Tuesday. Submits all the expense reports to Accounting for reimbursement. Answers the phone: “Child and Family Case Services.” She gets a cake and sends a card around the department when it’s somebody’s birthday. That’s her job.

 

 Nobody had a problem with Cora Reynolds before the little girl and boy arrived from Russia. Really, the problem was, Cora never sees a little kid, a freckle-faced, pigtailed little girl, unless somebody’s fucked her.

 

 Every rapscallion little boy, every scamp in bib overalls with a slingshot stuck in his back pocket, Cora’s only meeting him because he’s been forced to suck cock. Every kid’s gap-toothed smile, here it’s a mask. Every grass-stained knee, a clue. Every bruise, an indicator. Every wink or squeal or giggle, there’s a blank to check for it on the victim-intake form. It’s Cora’s job, keeping track of those interview forms. Keeping track of the kids, each case file, any ongoing investigation. Until what happened, Cora Reynolds was the best office manager ever.

 

 Still, what happens here is just damage control. You can’t unfuck a kid. Once you bang a kid, there’s no getting that geniioutof the bottle. That kid’s pretty much wrecked for good.

 

 No, most kids come in here quiet. Stretch-marked. Already middle-aged. Not smiling.

 

 Kids come here, and the first step is the evaluation interview with ananatomically detaileddoll. This is different from ananatomically correctdoll, but plenty of folks get them confused. Cora did. Got them confused.

 

 Your typical anatomicallydetaileddoll is made of cloth, sewn like a stuffed animal. It has strands of yarn for hair. The big difference between it and Raggedy Ann is the details: A floppy stuffed penis and balls. Or a lacy cloth vagina. A drawstring pulled tight in back to make a puckered anus. Two buttons sewn to the chest for nipples. These dolls are something the intake kids can use to play-act. To demonstrate what Mommy or Daddy or Mommy’s new boyfriend did.

 

 The kids stick their fingers in the dolls. Drag the dolls by their yarn hair. Hold the dolls by the neck and shake them until their stuffed heads flop. They hit and lick and bite and suck the dolls, and it’s Cora’s job to sew the nipples back on. Cora will find two new marbles when the little felt scrotum gets yanked too hard.

 

 Everything done to the kids gets done to those dolls.

 

 Nobody just stumbles into this line of work.

 

 Threads come loose from too many molested children molesting the dolls. Too many diddled little boys suck that same pink felt penis. Too many little girls have forced a finger, two fingers, three fingers into that same satin-lined vagina. Ripping it at the top and bottom. Little hernias of cotton batting were bulging out. Under their clothes, the dolls were smudged and dirty. Sticky and smelling bad. The fabric was rubbed into pills and snagged with scars where threads were gone.

 

 This little rag doll girl and boy the whole world gets to abuse.

 

 And of course, Cora did what she could to keep them clean. She stitched them back together. But one day she went on the Internet to find another pair. A new pair.

 

 Somewhere were women who made their career stitching tiny pocket-shaped vaginas or coin-purse scrotums. These kids, the women dressed in flowered calico dresses and bib overalls. But this time, Cora wanted something durable. She got on the Internet. She ordered a new pair, from some maker she’d never heard about before. This time, she confused anatomicallydetailedwithcorrect.

 

 Anatomically correct, she asked for, boy and girl dolls. Lowest price possible. Durable. Easy to clean.

 

 A search engine offered her two dolls. Made in the former Soviet Union. With flexible arms and legs. Anatomically correct. Because these were the lowest-priced, and because that was the county purchasing policy, she placed the order.

 

 Later, nobody ever asked why she ordered those dolls. When the box arrived, brown cardboard and big as a four-drawer file cabinet, when the delivery guy wheeled it up on a cart and left it next to her desk, when he made her sign his clipboard, then it was Cora first figured this might be a mistake.

 

 The moment they opened the box, when they saw what was inside, it was too late.

 

 It was Cora and a county detective, pulling the metal staples and then digging through the mats of bubble wrap, digging until they found a foot. A pink child’s foot, five perfect toes poking up, out of the Styrofoam pellets and bubble wrap.

 

 The detective wiggled one of the toes. He looked at Cora.

 

 “These were the cheapest,” Cora said. She said, “You don’t get a lot of choice.”

 

 The foot was pink rubber, finished with clear, hard toenails. The skin smooth, without a freckle or mole or vein. At this, the detective put a hand around the ankle and lifted it to show a smooth pink knee. Then a pink thigh. Then a shower of white packing peanuts. Bubble wrap popping and falling away. And a naked pink little girl hung from the detective’s fist near the ceiling. Her blond hair fell in curls, brushing the floor. Her bare arms hung down at either side of her head. Her mouth hung open, a silent gasp, showing white teeth small as pearls, and the smooth pink roof of her mouth. A little girl the age for Easter-egg hunts and First Communion and Santa’s lap.

 

 With one ankle in the detective’s hand, the girl’s other leg sagged, bent at the knee. Between her legs, spread there, not just anatomically correct but . . . perfect, was the girl’s pink vagina. The darker pink lips of it, curving inside.

 

 Still in the box, looking up at her, looking up at them all, was a naked little boy.

 

 A printed brochure fluttered to the floor.

 

 Then Cora’s arms were around the girl, hugging her pillow softness, clutching for a sheet of wrapping paper to put around the little body.

 

 The detective smiled, shaking his head, squeezing his eyes shut, and saying, “Great job atprocurement,Cora.”

 

 Cora held the girl, one hand cupped to hide the pink buttocks. One hand cupped to hold the blond head to Cora’s chest, and she said, “This is a mistake.”

 

 The brochure said the dolls were soft molded silicone, the kind used for breast implants. They could be left under an electric blanket and would hold the heat for hours of pleasure. Their skin covered a skeleton of fiberglass with steel joints. Their hair was inserted, strand by strand, planted into the skin of their scalp. They had no pubic hair. The male doll had an optional foreskin that you could roll onto the head of its penis. The girl doll had a replaceable plastic hymen you could send away for. Both dolls, the brochure said, had deep tight throats and rectums,for vigorous oral or anal entry.

 

 The silicone had a memory and would return to its original shape, no matter what you did. Their nipples could be tugged to five times their original length without tearing. The labia, scrotums, rectums could be stretched toaccommodate almost any desire.The dolls, the brochure said, could takeyears of violent, strenuous enjoyment.

 

 For clean-up, you just used soap and water.

 

 Leaving the dolls in direct sunlight might fade their eyes and lips, the brochure said in French, Spanish, English, Italian, and what looked like Chinese.

 

 The silicone was guaranteed odorless and tasteless.

 

 At lunch, Cora went out to buy a little dress and a little pair of pants and shirt. When she got back to her desk, the box was empty. Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap popped under her every step. The dolls were gone.

 

 In the ward room, she asked the dispatcher if he knew anything. The dispatcher shrugged. In the break room, a detective said that maybe someone needed them for a case. He shrugged and said, “Thatiswhat they’re for . . .”

 

 Outside, in the hallway, she asked another detective if he’d seen them.

 

 She asked, where were they, the kid dolls?

 

 Her teeth were edged together. The spot between her eyes ached from her brows bunching in the middle. Her ears felt blood-hot. Melting, glowing hot.

 

 She found the dolls in the director’s office. Sitting on the sofa. Smiling and naked. Freckle-faced and ashamed of nothing.

 

 Director Sedlak was tugging at a nipple on the boy’s chest. With her fingers, her thumb and index finger, just the dark-red fingernails, the director twisted and pulled at the pink nipple. With her other hand, the director trailed her fingertips up and down between the girl’s legs, saying, “Damn, that feels real.”

 

 To the director, Cora said she was sorry. She leaned down to brush some hair off the boy’s forehead, and said she had no idea. She crossed the girl’s arms across her pink nipples. Then, she crossed her plastic legs at the knee. She put both the boy’s hands spread open in his lap. Both dolls just sat there, smiling. They both had blue glass eyes, blond hair. Shining porcelain teeth.

 

 “Sorry for what?” the director said.

 

 For wasting county funds, Cora said. For buying something this expensive sight-unseen. She thought she was getting a good deal. Now the county would be stuck using the old rag dolls for another year. The county was stuck, and these dolls would have to be destroyed.

 

 And Director Sedlak said, “Don’t be silly.” She combed her fingernails through the girl’s blond hair, saying, “I don’t see a problem.” Saying, “We can use these.”

 

 But the dolls, Cora said, they were too real.

 

 And the director said, “They’re rubber.”

 

 Silicone, Cora said.

 

 And the director said, “If it helps, just think of each one as a seventy-pound condom . . .”

 

 That afternoon, even as Cora pulled the new clothes onto the boy and girl, detectives came by her desk, asking to check them out. For intake interviews. For investigations. Asking to reserve them for some hush-hush off-site evaluation. For overnight, to use them early the next morning. For the weekend. The girl, preferably, but if she wasn’t available, then the boy. By the end of that first day, both the dolls were booked solid for the next month.