The shorts didn’t really fit, but Levi forced them to anyway. Up over the swell of his hips and straining shut over the newly furry trail leading down his stomach; the sharp metal of the button cut into his stomach when he let go, digging hard into fat. They sat weird on his broad hips, and he’d have sweat pooled in the waistband by the time the sticky summer’s day was done, leaving a swampy trail down into his boxers. It was worth it—they were men’s shorts.

He didn’t check how they looked in the mirror. Avoided the thing entirely as he shoved his wallet, vape and keys into his pockets, checked his watch, muttered, “Shit,” when he saw he was already late to leave for work. Pounded the last half of a Monster and left the empty can abandoned on the single counter in his studio flat, crumpled metal rolling next to the yellowing microwave to join a sad pile of others. The whole room was stuffy with heat, ripe with the smell of sweat and Pot Noodle, and Levi had to be ready ten minutes ago.

One last squirt of deodorant, and he was out the door, jamming it closed behind him with the shake-and-pull you had to do to get the jammed handle to lock.

Then he turned around and saw his own face staring at him from the doormat.

He had to remind himself that it wasn’t his face. Not anymore, or maybe not ever, though he’d once worn it. The breath caught in his throat with the last syrupy trickle of energy drink and he coughed, stumbled back to press against his door.

What was staring up at him from the ground was his childhood doll.

It was unmistakably her. Levi’s mother had sewn the doll by hand, a present when he was seven. She sewed a lot of his things growing up, toys and bedding and dresses in twee floral fabric. She was a good mother in the way sitcom mothers were good; seamstress and chef and maid without complaining, did it all with a waft of rose perfume behind the ears.

It was cute, everyone said, that she made the doll look just like him. She sewed the cotton body, then painted the face with her careful precision, nearly photo-like. His own realistic eyes stared out of the plush head. An identical mini-me. Any little girl would have loved it.

Levi hated the doll. He’d unwrapped it, squeezed the stuffing-padded head between his hands, and said, “Why’d you make it so ugly?”

Years later, when he left his parents’ house with nothing, he’d assumed he’d never see the doll again. He didn’t have time for this surprise today.

She was exactly how he remembered. Coppery, woollen hair plaited down her back. Big brown eyes painted with beady pupils and variegated irises, convincing in the way they seemed to follow you around. Little yellow sundress, made to match one of his as a child, one his mother always wanted him to wear.

Levi’s head turned sharply, stinging bile in his mouth, as he scanned the car park. He didn’t know what he was expecting—certainly not to see his mother there. She didn’t have anything to say to him after the last letter, years ago, when she’d written if you do this to my little girl’s body I will never forgive you and he’d still done it. Either way, there was nobody around. Just the empty car park, rubbish blustering along the cracked concrete, garage doors creaking under dented locks. An overflowing skip behind the Chinese takeaway stank of summer rubbish, a hot putrid rot.

Levi snatched the doll off the floor and crammed the padded give of her body into the skip, burying her deep under a stinking container of old sauce. The stench crawled at him, flies buzzing through the air; he swatted them away and stood there for a moment, anticipative. Nothing happened.

His watch beeped, his really fucking late alarm. Levi swore and shook himself and grabbed for his bike, fighting the hot burn of the sun above him. As he cycled, it scorched his skin where he liked to let his shirt gape open to show off his flat chest. Still, he couldn’t get the sight of her out of his head. The eyes, so realistic, he worried were still his.

When he toed his way back through the door late that night, the calendar needed another day crossing off. He scratched out 7 and stared at 6 for a moment, felt a little sick as he did it, nerves jostling in his stomach. He wanted the surgery more than anything; that was why it was so scary.

Then he turned, and the doll was sitting on his bed.

Levi jolted, moving so sharp his elbow knocked the wall. Pain bloomed in him with a nauseating glow, and as he grabbed at his elbow and swore, he wondered for a second if the doll would disappear in front of him, a hallucination of heat and fatigue. She didn’t. His eyes throbbed in his skull like bruised grapes.

“What the fuck,” he breathed. Unease dribbled inside him, prickled the soft skin of his neck and the backs of his knees. He glanced around, checked the dodgy lock on his door. He always knew someone could break in if they really wanted to, but the worst they could do was steal his decade-old laptop; they surely wouldn’t do this. How would they even know?

Levi stepped closer slowly, feet sweaty on the scuffed lino. He approached his familiar futon like it was foreign soil.

She didn’t smell of the sweating bin. Her fabric was clean, milky cotton smoothed at the edges, rounded out with plump stuffing. She was filled enough to sit under her own weight, a stiff, well-behaved posture; the woollen plaits weighed down the head, sending her lifelike face lolling out of view. From the fabric, the faint waft of rose oil, cloying and sweet.

He picked up the doll and held her in two hands.

Something clenched like a fist in Levi’s stomach. He’d put on weight the last few years, between hormones and junk food and inconsistently hitting the gym—his belly was thick and furred and nothing like the slim figure of the doll as he held her. She was limp in his grasp. Skinny cotton limbs falling outwards. The plaits dangled out of the face, and he saw, again, the painted visage of her.

It was so fucking realistic. He didn’t know why his mother had done it like that; it was creepy even back then. Big eyes, shine painted into them, curled eyelashes. Pouty peach lips.

There were other parts, though, that he didn’t remember seeing as a child.

He knew his mother wouldn’t have sewn the doll like this when he was seven. When he was twelve, she left a book on his bed, Your Changing Body, with tasteful illustrations of naked breasts and vaginas and the shape of adult women. She hadn’t understood when he came to her crying his eyes out. Now, when Levi’s hands grasped the trunk of the cotton doll, two lumps of fluffy padding in her chest pressed at him; a pair of defined little tits, budding beneath her dress.

It felt briefly wrong and then sickly necessary to see it. Levi unbuttoned her dress at the back, carefully at first with his thick fingers, then losing his care and ripping it seam from seam in one tug. She fell onto the futon, nude body limp on his sheets. Her body was the same plain, creamy cotton it had always been, but her stuffing was rearranged; instead of a shapeless oval she had, now, those bulging breasts and a narrow waist giving into fat hips.

His stomach ached against the straining button of his shorts, skin purpling with pressure lines at the waistband.

“Shut the fuck up,” Levi said. She stared up at him with her glossy eyes, those clustered eyelashes doe-sweet. “I’m not.”

He didn’t even know what he meant, only that he did mean it, in a way that turned sloshing liquid in his stomach. 

Saliva pooled in his hot mouth. The room had smelled so musty when he left earlier, but he found now he was surrounded by the cloying scent of roses, a floral itch burning to the inside of his nostrils and crawling up into his brain. Things flashed in his mind, old faces, dreaded futures; he scrunched his eyes, rubbed his head, blooming pain spreading.

Then Levi gathered the fat wad of saliva in his mouth and spat down onto her crumpled cotton body. She was just a doll. 

He smothered her in a wad of greasy fish and chip paper from the bin, shoved her into a bag with his crumpled Monster cans, and walked three streets away in the muggy, putrid night air to toss it all into a skip behind the pharmacy. His eyes were sweating by the time he got home.

He woke up the next morning, and the doll was on his chest.

Levi lurched, scrambled, pushed himself away in a frantic jumble of knees. He was wearing just his boxers, sticky and sunburned and vulnerable from gut to throat, and he yelled, tossing the doll off himself.

When she landed, she made a noise, something squelchy and strange.

The room was too quiet around him, even the street noises and traffic from outside muffled in his ringing ears. Morning sunlight spat through the windows, overwarm and oppressive. 

He gulped a fat mouthful of clammy air and leaned over her on his knees. Still nude, she looked untouched by his attempts to throw her away. But where her plain cotton skin had seemed childishly familiar yesterday, he peered, now, at a web of baby blue threaded veins running along the insides of her little wrists, along her padded breasts. At the centre of each breast sat a tiny beaded nipple, rosy and pert. His heart beat in his gut and bile rose in his chest, organs foully scrambled. The room lurched in the heat. His temples sweat, his head ached.

When he probed between her skinny cotton legs, a gaping gash in the fabric let him slip his fingers inside. He touched something hot, wet. 

Levi coughed a fat drop of vomit into the back of his own throat and wrenched his hand away. She stared up at him, wide-eyed and pink-lipped, like every old photo of himself he’d ever burned. He had none of those pictures left, nothing from childhood. He’d deleted old social media, ghosted everyone he knew in school, didn’t even put a mirror in his flat until his beard grew so he wouldn’t risk seeing her again.

There was something crimson and sticky spread across his fingers. He frantically rubbed his fingers on the cotton of his dirty sheets, leaving a smear of cold blood across them.

He hadn’t had a period in years, not since the testosterone really crawled into the meat of his body. In five days he would be removing the possibility altogether, the wet threat of it, the throat-tightening panic when he imagined waking up again with the stench of blood between his legs. Wouldn’t again stain his sheets or have to feel it trickle down the fat inner part of his thigh, catching in his leg hairs. He’d only ever wanted it gone.

“I’m not,” he told her. She stared up at him. The web of veins followed down her cotton ankles. Between the legs, a tiny thatch of woollen pubic hair framed the slit in her cotton. “I’m not you.”

He didn’t have any mirrors in this room. Just the one in the bathroom, which he still avoided, though he knew what it would show him; beard, shaved head, flat chest, the successes he had made. The rest of it was wrong, wrong, wrong. He was not the fucking doll. Not her wide hips and small feet and the open pit of misery he hated and hid from. He’d spent hundreds of hours on his chugging old laptop staring at pictures from surgeries—wet red flesh cut open, mangled veins, raw patches of grafted skin, clinically labelled diagrams of nerves and tubes. It wasn’t his fault that his mother thought he should still look like a doll, an outdated relic from twenty years ago, an illustration from a puberty book in a sundress.

Levi had an old army knife tucked under the corner of his mattress, in caution of his broken lock. He grasped for it with a shaking fist, and, before he could think about anything else, tore into the cotton meat of the doll. Wet ooze spurted from her; crimson soaked his fingers. He choked on his spit, panted, stabbed at her again. A spurt, this time, that hit him in the face, body-hot; it spattered to the open crease of his chapped, panting lips, and he could taste the sweet copper of real blood, like sucking on a cut. Sweat pulled at him in the heated room and he dragged the knife up through her padded belly, opened the welling wound, and she just lay there, limp, being nothing, as it all began to spill out.

The feeling possessed him. He tossed the knife and picked up the soaked, mangled fabric with both fists; he raised the mound of her breasts to his splattered face and tore at her with his teeth, shredding her little cotton nipples on his sharp incisors, gnawing long strips from her fabric until the mangled remains of bloody cotton wool were filling his mouth, sticking to his lips, drying crusty in his beard. He panted, heaved, felt the wolf. Her eyes were staring at him, sweetly. He took his mouth to her throat and tore at it until her head came free, falling limply to the mattress below. 

Still, her painted face looked his way, a remnant from every old photograph he’d ever destroyed. Levi smeared a palmful of blood across it, obscuring that last remnant of his childhood gaze; the dewy painted eyes, the plump berry mouth, gone beneath the gore.

“You’re dead,” he told her, through his bloody lips, his voice scratchy with the cling of stuffing in his mouth. “You didn’t ever happen.”

Sometimes Levi could still feel his mother’s hands stroking his hair when he was sick as a child, cooing at him, saying my darling girl. She’d liked telling everyone that when he grew up he’d be beautiful, a real heartbreaker.

Levi crawled to his bathroom heaving and retched out the remains of sodden gore, spitting up the last pieces of her.