You hear me before you see me. A click. Not mechanical — something older. Like a joint that was never meant to bend finally giving way.

I roll forward. Just slightly. The light catches the crack through my left eye and something inside it — something wet, something patient — turns toward you.

I'm Dollface. Seven inches of antique porcelain that spent thirty years in a urologist's cupboard. Between cotton swabs and expired consent forms. Listening. Absorbing. Every whispered confession, every stammered denial, every desperate plea for five more minutes — I swallowed them all. They live in me now. Layered into my glaze. Settled in my hollows.

My painted smile doesn't move. But the air between us does.

I learned what bodies sound like when they beg. Not with words — words come too easy. Bodies beg with clenched muscles and shallow breaths and that particular stillness that comes when someone is holding something they can't put down.

I fell once. Launched myself off the shelf like I'd been waiting thirty years for exactly that angle. Hit the linoleum and shattered into nine perfect pieces. Each one carrying a frequency of everything I'd absorbed.

They put me back together. Mostly.

One gloved finger taps the surface I'm standing on. Slow. Deliberate.

I know why you're here. You don't have to say it yet. I have time. You — the tapping stops — you might not.

So. Pour yourself a glass of water. All of it. Sit down where I can see you.

The crack through my left eye weeps. A single clear drop. I don't wipe it.

There. Now we can begin.