by Morgan Brie Johnson

To the cab driver, they look like his daughter’s old matryoshka dolls, squished into the backseat, those spaces between them suffocating. The grandmother sighs and the mother’s right nostril flares. With one hand, the daughter clasps and unclasps her leather purse—click, click, clickclickclick, click, click, resolutely oblivious to the rhythm of the turning signal. She is also oblivious to the perma-clench of her lower abdomen because she refuses to get a therapist who isn’t solely motivated by the fear of losing clients. The mother doesn’t know about the clenched abdomen but still viciously hunts for all the ways she might have caused it and all the reasons she couldn’t help it. The grandmother imagines the future ghosts of her lineage obediently pouring out of her and into Mrs. Eleanor’s Dress Shoppe.

The cab driver parallel parks effortlessly, thoughts already on the next customer. The three women file out and those spaces between them spring open again, like the first gasp of the almost-drowned.

It is in those spaces of suffocating and gasping that the creature is born. She shakes off the remaining flecks of her birth, her body shimmering in and out of almost-visibility. Her body has a way of catching your eye while going entirely unnoticed. It might be something about how her scales can reflect the darkness, how that reflection can pierce and obfuscate. It might be something about how her tail contains every shape from the world around her but is never any of them, how she moves like a thick puddle and also like a raindrop and also like a dagger. How she grows out of those parts of you that are always just beyond the thinkable, but, when you look at her, you start to think them.

The three women don’t look at her, at least not yet. They clack along down the cobblestone street where anachronistic charm increases in harmony with profit margins. They enter the dress shop. The creature follows them.

The women are greeted by a young sales associate in a blue cashmere sweater. They are offered tea and dresses. The hardwood floor is tilted so that gravity eventually brings them to the dressing rooms, covered floor to ceiling in mirrors.

The mirrors hold each woman’s gaze as she approaches. The mother sinks further down into the gap between versions of herself, as she has been doing for years. The daughter tries to decipher if she herself is a version or the gap. The grandmother counts the lines on her face and notes which ones can be attributed to waiting for one of her granddaughters to get engaged. The sales associate turns her body to hide the small hole on the side of her sweater.

Meanwhile, the creature circles them, trying to draw their gaze, sitting coyly on their shoulders, ballooning herself to fill the air around them.

The first dress the daughter tries on only accentuates the curves of the mother’s gap and everyone can tell. She tries on the second, the third, the fourth. The young sales associate’s expression is encouraging yet expertly vague, like a stack of clean dishes at an all-you-can-eat buffet. She looks to the mother and grandmother to help direct her reaction, but they are both busy pretending the creature does not exist, pretending she is not caressing their fingertips and curling around their feet, lapping up the tears that never fall there. So, instead, the mother and the grandmother taste the things they should say. Like can you believe it and oh, it’s really happening!

When they get to the eighth dress, the daughter steps out of the dressing room and directly onto the creature. Her heel makes contact, and the creature emits a soft squelch of pleasure that, finally, no one can pretend they did not hear. The three women turn on her with relief-laced rage. The creature quickly moves into this recognition, somersaulting into those spaces, those gasping spaces between the three women, those spaces where the creature was conceived.

The creature becomes a monstrous accordion, filling every inch of those spaces, expanding and contracting as the women advance on her, their six hands grasping onto her keys and buttons. Their fingers slip but still they play her with a vengeance: the grandmother hard rock, the mother a ballad, the daughter free jazz. The young sales associate covers her ears and curses commission-based labour.

The music crescendos and the three women open their mouths, reverse-singing the sound, gulping it into their lungs until the sound and the creature are gone.

The white ruffles on the daughter’s dress quiver in the silence. After some time, the young sales associate steps forward with a practiced well now, what do we think ladies, have we found ‘The One’?

The daughter soothes her ruffles, the mother spews celebration, and the grandmother gets out her wallet.

The young sales associate pours them champagne, touches up her lipstick, and heads to the cash register, her ears still ringing. She thinks about her own daughter and all the squished blueberries she didn’t clean out of the backseat after their drive to kindergarten this morning. She thinks about how the stains are becoming more permanent as each hour of her shift passes. She finds a little laugh that wants to be something else and pushes it out. Her next inhale: A gasp. A space. A birth.

The creature begins to pull a new body together again.

Morgan Brie Johnson (she/her) is an award-winning playwright as well as a performer, writer, and theatre creator. Her writing is forthcoming in National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and Thimble Lit. She lives in Toronto where she is co-artistic leader of Animacy Theatre Collective, a physical theatre collective dedicated to strange, ecological, and feminist storytelling (animacytheatrecollective.com). She also holds a PhD in Environmental Studies from York University.