My first wife, Crystal, was a photographer with an outstanding and creative eye. Hopefully soon, I’ll be able to get her website back up and running, but, for right now, if you haven’t seen her photos, you’ll have to trust me. Hell, she could even make me look good ... and that’s just not easy.
For one of her classes, Crys decided to do a project that involved Barbie dolls. I’m not sure why the doll needed to be painted white, perhaps to get it to show up better on the black and white film stock, again, I just don’t know. She also was going to cut the doll into pieces. So, with a very sharp scissors, she carefully cut a foot off here, a leg in half there, continuing until the doll was in pieces all over the table.
To get the dolls, we raided every second hand store in three cities, eventually getting about 15 that fit the bill. One of the problems with dolls like that, however, is that the plastic begins to change as it ages, making it almost impossible to cut cleanly. As the scissors would make the cut, the plastic would fail, and suddenly, it looked as if there were a major hangnail stuck to the side of the body part. And Crystal, being the artistic perfectionist, would get extremely frustrated and toss the doll to the side and start cutting on another. In one afternoon, she painted, cut, and rejected each of those 15 dolls. On our next swoop through the second-hand stores, we found eight more dolls, and it was in this batch that she got the correct doll...
...and...Meisha earned her nomme de guerre...The Barbie Killer.
Crys was busy carefully cutting the third doll apart, and it ended up being the one that worked out. While she was touching up the paint, she knocked one of the other Barbies to the floor, and since we were both busy with something else, neither of us picked it up at that moment. I was in the living room working on a lesson plan, Crys was working on the prop, when we both heard a very loud, very dry “pop.”
“What the hell was that?”
“I don’ know,” she said, looking around the kitchen. “Okay, I’m gonna shoot now.” Crys flipped on the flood and spot lights, adjusting them, and picked up the camera. I started hearing the click snick ratchet of the camera, and then heard Crys tell Meisha to go away. I looked over, and as Crys was lining up her shots, Meisha started climbing Crystal’s leg to see what she was missing. As she bounced off Crys’ leg, it caused Crys to jitter the camera.
“Why don’t you use the tripod?” I suggested.
“We can’t. The assignment is for us to take artistic closeups freehand. No other supports than our body.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, but its good for me to learn how to do this.” She laughed, then kicked Meisha away again.
About a minute later, Crys looked at the exposure record and saw there was one or two pictures left on the roll. Meisha was standing against her leg still, so, Crys turned, focused fast, and snapped a picture of the cat.
It was the best picture on the entire roll.
After loading a new roll of film, Crys started firing off more shots. Suddenly, I catch something flying through the air in my peripheral vision. A moment later, now looking up, I see what had flown by. It was the head of a Barbie, liberated from its body. And Meisha was grabbing it by the hair in her mouth and flipping it high into the air. I looked into the dining room, under the table Crystal was using for her studio, and I saw the body. Lying there. Discarded.
The “pop” we heard earlier was the head being pulled free. The head was the huntress’ reward.
Crys died about a year later, and that Barbie head was still one of Meisha’s favorite toys. I run into it in random places around the house, and at first, that was a bit unsettling. The worst, however, happened a few months after Crys died.
I was lying in bed, having just hit the snooze for the second time, when Meisha jumped into bed and sat in the middle of my back. I half rolled to look at her and to tell her that the food she was looking for would be in the bowl in just a few minutes. What I saw wasn’t my sweet and innocent kitty.
I saw a floating Barbie head.
Meisha is in the Kitty Mafia.
I didn’t have to be told a second time. I got the cat her food.
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