Gabriel Jeroschewitz, November 24th, 2025
The Lot 19 Affair
The Auction
The auction hall was not a hall at all, but a repurposed slaughterhouse, tiled in porcelain and echoing with the ghosts of things that once bled here. Mr. Sallow stood at the podium, a man the colour of old parchment, his mouth permanently shaped into a toothless parenthesis. The buyers waited in sugar-colored suits, clutching brass paddles polished by their own sweaty palms.
Lot 19 — the dolls — were wheeled in on a steel cart, side by side, their detachable heads arranged neatly in velvet-lined trays like rare mangoes. The buyers cooed and hissed.
Each buyer got a minute alone with the dolls before bidding. That minute was a theatre of grotesque desire:
- Lady March, who likened herself to a “collector of sensations,” tapped the glass ribs of one doll and murmured that she would fill them with goldfish.
- The Brewer insisted he would pour stout into their clay stomachs and drink “from the source.”
- Mr. Chalk, who smelled like mothballs and thunder, caressed Lot 19’s blue-painted shoulders and claimed the chips in the paint were “music to the touch.”
When bidding began, the room became a slow, obscene pulse — each number called felt like a heartbeat in reverse, taking life instead of giving it. Mr. Sallow watched them feed on the fantasy.
Lot 19 was moved to the back of Mr. Sallow’s estate, an architectural mistake of corridors that looped back into themselves. In the sunroom, they were posed just so: elbows bent, knees spread “for symmetry.” Their clay skin was dusted every morning by a servant named Harp, who never looked them in the eye. Sallow said eye contact was “bad for the art.”
The dolls quickly learned Sallow’s habits. He never touched them with his hands — only with objects. A silver ladle to lift a chin. A feather duster to tickle the hollow between their thighs. He treated desire like calligraphy, never direct, always an ornate flourish. His guests came often, each one encouraged to “interpret” Lot 19 in their own way.
Some painted new mouths on the dolls.
Some sewn pockets into their stomachs.
One man replaced a head entirely with a birdcage, then filled it with finches until the sound drove everyone insane.
They accepted it silently. After all, art does not interpret itself.
The Anatomy That Watches
By the third month of captivity, Lot 19 learned to turn its parts against the buyers. The glass ribs could reflect light like blades. Detachable heads could roll like grenades, their hollow eyes distracting even the most fevered collector. Clay skin, when wetted, could dissolve just enough to smear across a hand, leaving a faintly burning mark.
The first incident was with Mr. Chalk — he reached for one doll’s head and found his fingers caught in a sudden fissure in her neck; the clay closed around him like a trap. He left with two fingers less than he’d come with, muttering about “texture failure.”
The dolls bided their time. They learned that the guests drank heavily — milk cordials, blood wine — until their sight blurred and their movements slowed. They noticed Sallow liked to leave doors unlocked during rainstorms, believing no art would risk getting wet. That would be their opening.
It happened during a downpour that made the gardens look like a drowned city. Sallow had invited his “most loyal buyers” for a private showing. Lightning pooled in the glass ribs of the dolls, making them look like lanterns.
When the buyers approached, Lot 19 turned gentle actions into violence — heads rolled underfoot, toppling men in slippery arcs; paint flakes flew like hornets into eyes; blue clay smeared into mouths until speech became choking.
Lady March fell backward into a fountain; The Brewer was found gagging on a shard of rib; Mr. Chalk tried to flee but slipped on a head laughing in the rain.
The dolls moved fast. They could bend in ways bones couldn’t, slide through corridors like spilled ink. Out of the open garden gate they went, their laughter carrying over the storm like music from somewhere both holy and profane.
The next morning, Sallow’s guests searched the grounds. They found only the trays of heads — empty, damp, smelling faintly of moonlight. Under the skirts of the remaining display mannequins were nests of maggots, writhing like a pale alphabet no one wanted to read.
Rumours spread. Some claimed the dolls had dissolved into rainwater and tasted faintly of salt. Others swore they saw a procession of blue-painted women walking along the riverbank, carrying their heads tucked under their arms like relics.
In truth, Lot 19 swam to a place only they could find — a silver lake under a milk-colored moon. They waited there, bodies pressed together, clay warming in the night. They were still art, but no longer for sale.
One doll — her name lost to auctions — fell in love with another in that lake. It was not the sudden, fiery kind, but a slow binding of seams. They polished each other’s paint, shared their detachable faces like masks, and whispered in the language of unowned things.
What they loved most was the refusal. The deliberate absence of buyers, of voices calling them “wife, whore, mistress, maid, mother.” In their own mythology, they were creatures carved by accident, bred in captivity, freed by rain—lovers in exile.
They danced on the moonlit shore until the wind carried their breath away, becoming stories told by old river women:
“The doll people are gone, but if you stand quiet enough, you’ll feel”
