Flash fiction by Melissa Flores Anderson

The Paper Doll Collective

The paper dolls queue close together, almost touching, like paper chains. They stand with their paper outfits carefully curated, paper tags folded over their paper shoulders, paper name tags hanging from their necks. They carry paper cups from the Messenger Coffee place down the block and trade paper money for books and stickers and ideas. They fill the Power and Light district, Main Street and Crossroads. They wipe barbecue sauce off their paper faces with paper napkins.

The paper dolls have escaped from their assigned playsets to gather together in a new scene where they recognize each other, but barely, faces stretched from tiny circles, like images of toys in paper circulars. They shake hands and tap shoulders and slap backs, forgetting that paper can be sharp and paper cuts smart. Some of the paper dolls know each other well, or think they do. They twist their paper fingers together, fill reams with their paper dreams, tear pieces of their paper hearts off and glue stick the confetti bits to each other.

They promise to stay in touch, write letters, send postcards, swap photographs. But instead they fold themselves into suitcases and envelopes, and deliver themselves home, where the paper ideas are put away to make time to earn paper paychecks at day jobs that pay the stacks of bills that arrive each month. They long to touch their paper foreheads together, in commiseration, but summer and fall and winter keep them separated until spring arrives again and they can leave their paper bosses and spouses and children and pets.

The paper dolls ride paper airplanes and coast on the Santa Ana winds above the Hollywood sign and Griffith Park, landing on Figueroa Street. They have traded their cold-weather paper outfits for California spring, for paper t-shirts and skirts and flip-flops, with tabs folded between their big toe and the index toe. The paper dolls complain about Ubers and freeways and how long it takes to get anywhere in a sprawling metropolis. They eat tacos and drink 805 in rooftop bars and dive bars and walk down Hollywood Boulevard, stepping on paper stars.

The paper dolls fill out bingo cards, run pens across title pages with messy signatures, offer advice to newcomers as though they are wise, old tomes. They say hello to the paper faces they met the year before and avoid the ones who tore off pieces of their hearts and sprinkled bits in midwestern streets instead of gathering them into pockets for safekeeping like they promised to do. The paper dolls have learned some lessons. That paper hearts and paper dreams crumple and yellow with age and no one wants to buy last year’s old chapbook.

The paper dolls promise that this year will be the year they finish their paper drafts of novels or short story collections, when they will sign paper contracts for book deals.

In their real lives, the paper dolls get married and divorced. They have babies and raise children. They check paper homework sheets and turn in paper report cards. They feed fish and toss paper plates in the trash. They fall in love with strangers they spent an hour with at a bar on Sunset long after the sun had set because that stranger shared the same distrust of Oxford commas. They wait for spring to come again.

The paper dolls move down Charles Street, across from the harbor, where the clouds are low over the still water. The paper dolls laugh. They smile. Someone takes a picture of the paper dolls, sends it around to the collective. They read words from paper phones and paperbacks and napkins and postcards.

The words are funny. The words are somber. The words are true. The words tell lies. The paper doll’s voices are steady, they quiver, they whisper, they shout. The words fill the room, waft out the door as someone comes in, cross the cobbled street and flit onto the water’s surface.

They read in conference rooms, in restaurants, in bars, in coffeeshops, in hotel rooms, and silently to themselves in taxis and airplanes and walking down the street. They write when they are not writing, words tangled in their paper heads.

The paper dolls lift aluminum cans, glasses of beer, plastic cups of free peanut butter whiskey to their lips. The paper dolls stand in a circle. They tell more stories, but this time to an audience of one or two. The circle shifts, like eddies on the waterfront, particles combining in new configurations. The paper dolls are close together, almost touching, like paper chains, and this time they promise the connection will be sustained. They will not pack away their paper hearts.

The paper dolls thrive best as a collective set.