Issue Three

pleas for mercy but breaking glass, he
froze with the cane over his head as if it
were as powerful as Thor’s hammer,
wheezing as fat beads of sweat
glimmered in his bushy white brows. He
lowered the cane in the midst of his
stupefaction and saw that he was
standing in a pile of broken ivory hands
and legs and faces, namely, the
shattered remains of a million little
porcelain dolls.
The dolls littered the floor in an ocean,
rising up to the ceiling in an eerily
identical wall of frilly pink dresses, white
bonnets and marble eyes. These were
his disciples; they were the perfect
hollow, lifeless shells to inhabit his
perfect hollow, lifeless world. The
motionless eyes stared at him from
every direction, never asking to be loved
and never betraying him in wickedness;
all of them just staring, staring.
As Kurt watched, backing up against the
locked door in his small recess of clear
space, the dolls amassed together as if
they were but one living thing, forming a
sheer wall before him of tinkling
porcelain, a wall of people that couldn’t
feel and couldn’t love, a wall of people
that were only good for sitting there and
staring at their owners while they
slept. The wall broke and the dolls
toppled over their King, drowning him in
a sea of icy hands, flaxen hair and hard,
ruby red lips. Surely he would die here
encompassed by this army of dolls alive
in their enormity, and as he wallowed
beneath the unyielding pressure of their
cold hard weight, their eyes still staring,
staring, he wished he’d never been a
King at all.
The lights went out and his lungs were
relieved; he could feel nothing pressed
against him now but the darkness. He
scrambled over the floor and came
clumsily to his feet, ready to fight the
next wave of the supernatural, certain
he would win this time. He was
prepared for anything, anything but what
he was about to see in the mirror.
The Uglylights invaded him with an
explosion of white-hot agony, tearing the
layers between truth and lie as if they
were as feeble as paper. Kurt Dailey
crumpled to the floor, dazzled and
blinded, and when at last he rose, he
rose redefined; he rose as a piece of
matter warped by an immutable
action. He too was powerfully impelled
to scream, but when he opened his
plaster mouth his dry throat could do
nothing but choke on its own dust.
He was cocaine white from head to foot,
his face blanched and lineless like a
solid ghost. He was cloaked in moth-
eaten green and gold robes that fit him
like window curtains, and when he tore
them open he saw that his pale body
had no shape at all; it was a smooth,
chalky mannequin with arms and legs
attached at sharp, unnatural seams that
cracked open and spilled plaster chunks
and powder when he moved. Kurt was
completely hollow on the inside; he
could hear in his empty head the air
whistling through his body. He tried
again to scream but there were no lungs
and no vocal cords, just an artificial
mold full of black, empty space, a mold
that was crumbling to nothing all the
time. On his hairless head was a
tarnished silver crown encrusted with
plastic jewels, and in his hand his cane
THE UGLYLIGHTS