Realistic Three Hole Marilyn Monroe

   ‘This will feel a little cold,' he said.

I gasped, it was an exaggeration, though it wasn't the place or time. I really had no need for the voice now, because she would not speak. The men who would take her home knew what she had to say.

He was wearing a beige polyester shirt and sneakers without socks. He told me to relax and said his name was Steve. He looked at me lying there semi-naked with the same expression he may have had discount shopping. The plaster was hardening, heating up. He took his spat Chula down my thighs and I was all big blue eyes. Back me into a corner I realise I don't know when to stop impersonating. My real expressions were put in a box and tossed into the Hoover dam as I drove across. The ones I have now belong to Marilyn Monroe.

  My hands were shaped by glove patterns, my smile lifted from Dental Association casts of her teeth.

I knew there were others, women who made their living by looking like Marilyn.  I imagine the convention, the skirts rising up on the breath of coos and gasps. There never was one. We had no need to meet. ‘Steve' positions my legs into a symmetry of angles, slightly parted, slightly bent at the knee. I lie there and I think I'm the best Marilyn Monroe there ever was. I saw my first Marilyn opening a new deli counter at the mall, wearing a white dress, she stood with her legs in the same position as the giant scissors in her hands.  Guys in hair nets stood beside her to have their picture taken. No one asked for her autograph. My mother was annoyed no one was slicing ham. If you got too close the illusion was lost. It wasn't Marilyn at all, but a woman with slightly crooked nose, tottering in a dead woman's shoes.

  My arms were done last week, their mould lies on a shelf across from the leatherette couch. They don't look like anything to do with me. The fingers are open enough to hold a small teddy bear or a whip. I knew a girl who said she'd do impersonations as a temporary thing, to get her foot it an imaginary door. She squeezed her own agenda from her girdle like toothpaste. It was a mistake. Cutting a ribbon sometimes the smile was her own. Who's gonna pay for that? I thought I'll just be Marilyn. It made me a cut above the rest. I sprawled over cars I couldn't afford and rode in parades, then I went home, took off the clothes and waited for the phone to ring so I could be Marilyn again.

 ‘Steve' smeared the mould on parts of me that look a penis in the eye. Half way through he took a phone call from his dog walker. I lay there like a cheapo pharaoh covered in plaster watching a fly land on the outside of the cast. It walked around, rubbed its legs then disappeared. I waited for the plaster to set. When it was it wasn't Steve who carefully removed the cast. He had to go home. It was a woman with a hair lip with a t shirt with cats on. I stood to take a shower then looked at the mould of Marilyn/ myself. Then, like the men who'd make love to her, I ran my fingers over every inch of the cast. It looked smaller than I'd imagined, I traced the tiny spirals of her ears and found they lead nowhere; the love doll had no need to hear. I went back home and walked past the hotels and fancy houses, their windows flickering with the light of TV's. I wondered how many rooms real life Marilyn was in, lain on beds and sat on scotch guarded couches with lonely men sat beside her. I ate my microwave dinner and looked out the window still imagining their fantasies played out on my body in latex as they whispered, cried or whimpered another woman's name.