I think it happened in winter, in January, in this strange city where I lived every night in my realistic dreams.

A few dozen meters from the Akanian tower, a small Parisian café had imposed it’s tables and crowd, amongst whom I easily recognized Flower Doll with her cape of white petals, the Ragdoll cat, playing Lolita behind her huge dark glasses, hiding those round blue eyes, too blue, so deep.

Seated below, I identified without hesitation, despite her new falling beret, also white, Little Akan, concerned about the beauty of her skin, which was protected from the sun with her new immaculate hat.

She also wore large dark glasses to avoid the assault of UV on the outline of her huge eyes.

Syndra Raynaud, “the amputated hand”, was smoking an American vanilla flavoured cigarette, her long fingers stretched languidly, leaning against the arm of the little Akan.

She seemed to have forgotten her “owner”, the doll thief amputated by Iranian militia.

That she had still not shown the tip of her arm.

Betsy Mac Call alone failed to “rendez-vous” on the terrace; immensely tired, she had fallen asleep on the 32nd floor of the tower, after running some 40 km the day before for: “The anorexic Paper Doll Charity ‘.

- “Crikey!” Cried the flower doll (usually dumb and blind), watching the arrival of a hesitant creature deliciously chiseled on the other side of Avenue A.

- “She is naked, her head is bare. So thin and so beautiful!”

“The androgynous Doll”. Self-portrait 1984. Alice Odilon copyright.

“Her breasts are almost non-existent; pointed like sand dunes”, muttered a man sitting next to a jealous pinup.

“She is so white, so long, so tense!”

Continued an ugly young woman with blotchy skin and short brown hair, sitting at a table nearby.

- “What a special way of walking! What naive elegance!”

Dazed, Syndra Raynaud’s fingers stretched towards the sky.

“Look! Her icy eyes turned up, as if this doll of indeterminate sex had experienced a sexual orgasm”.

Added the severed hand, suddenly animated by an all invasive excitement.

- “She seems hungry, from afar I see her hunger, and her denial of hunger to be beautiful, independent, and rebellious.”

Cried the Rag doll cat sitting next to Flower doll.

- “It seems she wants to escape her shadow.”

- “What strange concern can be read on her face!”

- “Yes, she seems terrified by something which cannot be seen, which can’t be told!” added an alert Akan.

- “Those transparent eyes, it’s terribly disturbing!” purred the cat!

- “Such confusion in her transparent gaze, such a disappointment! What a poor doll!” Exclaimed the waiter, pale with fatigue.

The hesitant creature approached quietly with a broken gait like a puppet.

The rigidity of her limbs prevented a smooth movement and resulted in jerky rhythms, surprising, disturbing and yet at the same time very attractive.

No one could take their eyes off this doll stiffened and annihilated by the absence of any identity.

It was nice to see that she belonged neither to the masculine gender, by the way she carried her head and the smoothness of her skin mottled with cold, or by the length of her black lashes caressing the light of night, nor by the feminine gender with her allure of a teenage boy.

Akan imagined her as the leftover of some pleasure, prostitute, frustrated transsexual, slave god offered to violence and dejection of a fat community of power and lies.

Her body seemed that of Apollo emaciated by the desire to be a woman.

This appearance, terribly childlike and lost like a prostitute or doll, sometimes disappeared into the light, if one considered her arm and the acute angulation of her legs.

Nothing like a woman, rather a young man and yet neither one nor the other!

A thin young woman exposed to all for sale!

Tattooed, burnt by cigarettes, an androgen with all body hair removed for the scene and enjoyment of the Illuminati.

(The object of the hidden desires of these gentlemen of power, concealing their indomitable homosexual and predatory impulses.)

- A castrated angel like a lost, dirty, vagrant fairy.

Virility and vulnerability combined with the forces projecting from her skin so close to the bone.

Her thinness was no more; her skeleton was all, her attitude replaced her missing flesh.

At the same time, this lack of everything, inspired a savage sexuality to anyone who was looking: a fantasy of rape, of chains, of slaps and final possession of this body devoid of possessions.

She looked so embarrassed to live her character, this aristocratic carcass.

Blinded by fear, she felt suddenly stared at by these people gathered together on the terraces.

She gave a vitreous glance, opalescent and clear, cruel and tender at the same time.

As if to say: “I want to disappear but I want to be subjected to your criminal desire to rape me.”

Her brilliant ‘self’ took refuge in her magnificent eyes, that were impossibly beautiful , and her erectile skeleton, which would eventually fall to ashes.

Akan was eager to invite her to sit among her friends.

But was it humane to ask someone who was so hungry to join those who live?

Alice ODILON/ translated with help from David. January 2011.