dressmakers and dumbwaiters

on the street where i work, right on the dirty outskirts of the fashion district, there are many shops crammed full of strange things. my favorite is one whose name i can't remember (largely because it's obscured by scaffolding, and thus not burned into my consciousness every day), but its windows are full of strange and mysterious parts belonging to ancient sewing machines, scissors that date back to the victorian era if they're a day, and a number of old-fashioned dressmakers dummies in varying states of decreptitude. i love passing this place, where the sweat-stained light fixtures give the long, narrow room a feeling of otherworldliness, as though you're looking behind the scenes of your own mind. or perhaps someone else's.

today, it gave me a little tour down my own wistful primrose path, though all flashes and minutae. a painfully bright day just before graduation and the destruction of a mannequin by way of insertion into a dish chute (not entirely unlike a dumbwaiter) in the school kitchens. i remember the way the freshly cut grass smelled, i remember the way the sunshine clung to my clothes for a good ten minutes before being vanquished by the cellar-like air of the kitchen, i remember the feeling of abandon, of freedom, of glee in a little bit of mindless destruction. i remember the clover puffball that i'd fashioned into a ring. but i can't remember who i was with, or why we were there, or where the damn mannequin had come from.

i could paint you a picture in freeze frame, but the narrative is long gone.