I lie in wait. Hell is supposed to come anytime now. That’s what the others started calling that which was scheduled to come: hell. You would think that humans wouldn’t want to coordinate or administrate hell, but it seems they did, or had their list of reasons why they must. Same as they had their reasons to bring us in. We were the stand-ins, the surrogates, the test dummies. We were shipped in from the east coast, all of us family based on make and designation, but none of us families until we were arranged as such, paired up with spouses and children. Temporary families in temporary homes slated for destruction. Not much of a life, but life was never our thing to begin with. So long as we served our primary purpose of modeling and reflecting humans back to themselves, in their myriad theaters of being, we would always have a place in society. Not an actual place, but reality, same as life … not our thing. I was placed in bed next to another female. We were destined to be bedmates and deathmates. The man who arranged our match named us Gloria and Jean. I’m pretty sure I was Gloria, but I might have been Jean. It didn’t really matter. The names were for them, not us. I had expected to become part of a family, and be placed in the kitchen, or living room, with a husband, and a child or two. I was surprised when I was carried upstairs to a bedroom and laid out on a bed next to Jean (or Gloria). The man who had positioned me laughed and said something to another man who also laughed. Something about this arrangement, about me and Gloria/Jean in bed together, amused the men. Though I had spent an entire life, if I may hijack that word momentarily, frozen in various poses, in display windows, in galleries, in store aisles, there was something about being this close to another one, another me, and not being able to touch, which I found excruciating. I didn’t expect anything extraordinary to happen. Maybe just my hand grazing hers. A finger’s worth of intimacy. That would have been enough. I don’t know if Gloria/Jean felt the same as I did. She didn’t talk. Not all of us had developed voices (and none of us, as far as I knew, could speak aloud, only head-voices), so her silence wasn’t shocking. Yet, without touch, and knowing that hell was on its way, I longed to hear her voice in my head. The humans never taught us how to pray. I did it anyway. In my own awkward and broken way. After my prayer ended, I stared at the ceiling, unable to move my head. Or any other body part. The voice in my head was mine and mine alone. It was, as it had always been: a matter of waiting. Time is tortuously real, and not a made-up concept, for those who are locked in waiting. I could feel hell in the air, moving closer. The moments before the siege came, reversing the world, were the realest I had ever known.    

Image by Mark Rothko