[FICTION]

[11/19/25]

Soft Launching

by Jasmin Nahar

Everyone’s clear preference for the new hire would have been less upsetting if she wasn’t a superior version of me. She, like me, had long hair but it seemed to grow only on the expected places—scalp, eyebrows, and lashes. I snuck a look at her knuckles when she typed next to me once and there was nothing, no hair at all. She, also like me, wore suits to the office, but hers were professionally tailored and not sagging at her ass or bunching at her armpits. Her one glaring flaw was her lack of consideration, however. Her phone was always buzzing with notifications that distracted me. Even when she put it on silent it was impossible to ignore the screen lighting up from the corner of my eye.

In just two months she had managed to build a congregation of new friends who crowded around her desk each Monday to discuss their weekends. No questions were ever directed at me. Superior Me’s answers were generally quite interesting, performatively so at times. She was recently at the gallery show of a friend who is an artist—Friends! Who are artists!—and even when doing nothing at home she would add “with my boyfriend,” which made it sound less pathetic than if I said it, a frustrating double standard.  I told myself that I didn’t care that they never acknowledged me, or that they never invited me to lunch in the canteen where they ate enormous, expensive salads. I bought a meal deal every day—allowing myself something exciting like a full-fat fizzy drink instead of water on Fridays—and had it at my desk.

That’s why it took me by surprise when Superior Me turned to me one Monday and asked, “What did you get up to?” The other women around her desk looked as if they were discovering me for the first time, as if I hadn’t written “happy birthday” in neat script in all their cards and, for one of them, lent her pads when she had come on her period. That particular woman had even been relieved that the pads I carried were the nighttime ones, as she mentioned hers were heavy. What did I do on the weekend? Called my mother. Scrolled Instagram. Killed a spider.

“It was just a quiet one,” I said, to their clear disinterest. They didn’t expect any other answer, I realised. “With my boyfriend,” I added.

“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” said Heavy Flow.

You’ve never asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s still early days, I guess…”

“Oh, that’s exciting!” Woman 2 perked up. She had very big eyes, a wide, thin-lipped mouth that looked like it could fit her fist in it easily, and a sickly complexion. I nicknamed her Kermit. “How did you meet?”

“You know we actually didn’t even meet on a dating app,” I said. “We met in person, on the tube, can you believe it?”

“I wish I had a meet-cute like that,” said Woman 3, who was so nondescript she warranted no nickname at all.

A chatter of agreement erupted of how lucky I was, how those kinds of moments never happen outside of films.

I decided his name was Kevin. He was of mixed heritage, Singaporean and white. He was an engineer of some variety but, typical me, I had never thought to ask him what kind. We were the type of people who went running together and no, I didn’t know about that run club, I would have to check it out. And yes we had been to that brunch place in Stokey, it was so good. No I didn’t have the “slutty eggy benny,” I would have to have that next time! I felt my face move in new and unusual ways as the conversation ended and they moved back to their desks. I was smiling.




“That’s the most I’ve ever heard you talk,” Superior Me said.

My smile dropped a fraction. “I guess I can be a bit shy.” I wanted to know why she bothered to include me but understood that was the wrong question to ask. It was like asking why you had gotten an invite to a party. I had not experienced such a thing but I guessed that you were just supposed to say, “Thank you.”

“I get that, I used to be the same way,” she said as if she had bravely overcome an illness with a terminal diagnosis.

After a while she said, “Do you have Instagram, by the way?”

“Sure,” I said. My account was mostly empty, and the pictures were all ones without me in them. Landscapes from solo trips, a cat that wasn’t even mine.

“Not much of a poster?” she said once she was on my profile.

“I’m more of a Stories person,” I lied.

“Same! Posting on grid is cringe.”

“So cringe,” I said.

Over the course of the next week, the other Office Women also followed me. Heavy Flow, Kermit, even Woman 3. On Saturday I decided to debut Kevin with a soft launch. I placed a second mug next to mine on a table with a movie in the background and enough snacks for two laid out.

Heavy Flow liked it. In the darkness of my living room, I beamed.

“Quiet one this weekend?” she asked me on Monday.

"Yeah, just had a movie night with Kevin. I hadn’t seen all of The Lord of the Rings and he made me watch them." She rolled her eyes and laughed and said that her husband loved those films too. Later, the four of them invited me to lunch with them where I paid £15 for a Caesar salad and discussed Kevin more.

"Do you have a picture of you two together?" Woman 3 asked.

"I broke my phone the other week and I hadn’t backed it up," I say.

Everyone made sympathetic sounds, and one of them even lightly patted my shoulder.




After a few more pictures of receptacles placed together it dawned on me that this format may grow tired.  I would have to get creative. Luckily, you can order all sorts of things on eBay, one such thing being a replica of a human hand, even a suitably ethnically-ambiguous one. I booked a table at a nice, white-tablecloth restaurant, and placed Kevin’s hand across the table from me. The waiter frowned but didn't say anything, maybe thinking it was a prank I was playing on someone. I tagged the restaurant and Kermit replied, asking me if it was any good, that she’d heard great things. I told her it was delicious and omitted that I decided to only buy a starter once I realised the mains were £40. On Monday we all went for salads again, and this time I added Bavarian steak to mine to further reiterate that I was a woman of taste. A woman who would pay extra for chewy meat sitting under a hot lamp that would probably make her want to shit herself later. Kermit saw me order it and did the same. I understood, for once, what power felt like.




A week later I bought large shoes for Kevin because I wanted to subtly imply something about the size of his penis. I didn’t even know if that correlation was true. My knowledge of penises was quite limited, as I had only seen three. One was from a man who flashed me when I was ten in the park. My mother had been distraught, but I was mostly confused about why the man was so proud of the disgusting, shrivelled appendage between his legs that he’d wanted to show strangers. The feet and calves that would go into the shoes were easy enough to acquire. Once they arrived, I inserted them into the trainers and headed to the park in the early hours of the morning on Sunday before anyone could see me. I snapped my feet next to Kevin’s on the ground and captioned the picture "Early morning run!" before bundling the body parts into my Tesco Bag for Life. The legs poked out of the top like two baguettes, which earned me some strange looks on the bus.

Later that evening I almost tripped over one of Kevin’s calves. Scattered as they were in the corridor, they looked sad and lonely. I brought the legs into the living room and put them on the floor, still in their shoes from earlier. It looked as if someone had partially, spontaneously combusted and that was all they had left behind. I took the hand and placed it in my own. The texture was as soft and comforting as that of a person. I brought it to bed and continued to hold it, and wondered how it would feel to rest my head on a chest instead of a pillow.

Luckily, mannequin torsos are available with next-day delivery on Prime. It was smooth and firm and white, with a bald, featureless head and adjustable arms. I dressed the torso in a baggy hoodie—also from Prime, so convenient. He should have been perfect but something was wrong. Missing, even. Then it dawned on me. I carefully took a hacksaw to Kevin’s right wrist and glued his real hand onto it, the one I first bought. The fleshy tone of it against the pale white of the forearm was quite striking, I thought. He looked, if you squinted, almost like a person. I propped him up on a series of stacked boxes, resulting in a mirror selfie where my face was at roughly pec-level. I cropped the photo and posted it.

"Cute!" Superior Me commented.

Heavy Flow liked it.

"You’re nearly a real boy," I said to Kevin, as a joke. His expression was blank. On the sofa I moved one of his arms and placed it on my shoulder then turned to him and smiled. Still, he wasn’t smiling back at me.




The steady rise of engagement couldn’t last, and yet I was surprised when it slowed. The likes tapered off until even Kermit, my most loyal story-liker, neglected to interact with all of them. I knew that it wasn’t my fault, but rather a problem with Kevin’s physique—it limited our range somewhat. Variety was key, according to the social media strategy blogs I had started reading. I had increased my Instagram posting cadence to a few times a week, as the blog advised, but inspiration for ideas was running dry. Some thighs were due to be on their way, which would hopefully help. I’d ordered them weeks ago, and yet every day I arrived home to a parcel-less doorway.

"What is going on??" I messaged the seller one night at home, hunched over the dining table. Kevin was watching me from the sofa.

They replied quickly. "I’m so sorry about this. They may have gotten lost in the post?"

"Can you resend them?"

"I’m low on materials so am experiencing some delays. At best they would be with you in three to four weeks."

The idea of waiting three to four more days was enough to make me nauseous.

I sighed.

"Never mind. Can I at least get a refund?"

"I’m sorry, I’m not liable once it’s been sent out.”

I banged my fist on the table then yelped from the pain.

You fucking bitch you fucking cunt I hope you die.

"No problem! I totally understand."

The new full-body mannequin wasn’t ideal, but at least it arrived the next day. Like a skilled butcher, I got to work sawing it into pieces and leaving just the hips, a full, firm buttocks and thighs. I attached them to the existing torso and then added the calves before bagging up the spare limbs and dropping them in the black bin outside. After all my effort, Kevin could finally stand upright unassisted.

"You’re alive!" I said in a spooky voice like a character from an old-timey horror film. Kevin’s face remained blank and unsmiling. I drew my thumb across his mouth in a gentle upward curve. Please smile for me.




I had to get to the office early the next day to use the printer before anyone could see me. I checked the time—nobody should be in for the next half hour. The printer whirred into life and I held my breath, hoping that whatever it spat out wouldn’t disappoint. I took the sheet, still warm, and held it up to admire it. The perfect smiling visage of the actor Henry Golding—Kevin was always being told he looked just like him. It didn’t fit neatly into my bag so I folded it in half and tucked it away in a hidden compartment. I headed to the stationery cupboard and looked for anything useful to steal—scissors, a hole punch.

"I’m thinking, shall we all go for drinks after work?" Superior Me asked me at the end of the day.

"So sorry, but I really can’t, I’ve got plans with Kevin."

"Oh, no worries," she said.

Her tone was light but I saw her face fall. Was she disappointed? I did my best to hide my glee, only allowing myself to smile once I was alone in the lift.

I made sure to be careful when cutting out the face and, in lieu of elastic, used the shoelace from one of my trainers. In under an hour Kevin had the handsome face he so deserved.

"Look at you," I said, stroking his smooth, papery cheek.

He smiled back at me. I kissed him on the lips gently, timidly, but he surprised me by kissing back with more passion. An open mouth.




On Monday I found Superior Me was crying at her desk. She was an ugly crier it turned out, much to my delight.

"What’s happened?" I said.

"I think me and my boyfriend are breaking up," she said. The Office Women were moving towards our desks for our weekly chat. When they saw her expression they all started to crow about how beautiful she was, how easily she would find someone else. I tried to pretend this didn’t sting for some reason. If Kevin dumped me, would they be this kind? Though, of course, I didn’t want that to happen. His body was reassuringly weighty in the night, his hands both comforting and skillful.

At noon we didn’t get our Big Salad Lunch because Superior Me wanted pasta instead. I made a mistake ordering a watery, lukewarm carbonara. Nobody asked how I was doing. The hour was dedicated to consoling Superior Me while she dabbed at her big, watery eyes with a napkin.

"You deserve so much better," I said only because it seemed the right thing.

Everyone nodded and echoed my sentiments. A forkful of the carbonara dropped straight onto my lap. I dabbed it with a napkin but it only rubbed the stain in further. A whitish, semen-like blob defiling my favorite trousers. 

The first two trains home were cancelled. When I eventually got onto one, a woman yelled at me and accused me of shoving her. She was lucky I didn’t push her out of the doors. Rain thundered down as I walked from the station and, upon arriving at home, the dishes were still in the sink where I’d left them.

"You could have done those. I’ve had a hard day," I said to Kevin. He smiled at me silently.

"It’s like she’s always going to be better than me," I said. "She’s always got to have the upper hand."

Kevin’s expression stayed the same.

"Can you just say something?" I screamed. I flung the wet umbrella still in my hand at him and heard a thud as his hand came off his body.

"Oh my God, I’m so sorry." I ran to him and picked it up. I fell to my knees and cried, his hand still in mine. It was then, looking up at him, the feeling of his fingers entwined in mine, that I understood how to make things right.




My credit card limit was quite modest so I couldn’t spend too much. I even gave it three weeks because I didn’t want to rub it in.

For my caption, a simple "I said yes!"

"OMG CONGRATULATIONS," commented Heavy Flow.

"AHHHH I hope I have an invite to the wedding haha," from Kermit.

Woman 3 opted for, "This is incredibleeeee xxxx"

Superior Me didn’t comment.

Not that I minded. People had grown quite tired of her anyway. She had lost weight but it looked terrible on her because she was very thin to begin with. At the office she was ignored as people approached me with questions. How did he propose? Was I thinking of a destination wedding or something close to home? On the train back I could only think of how excited Kevin would be to hear about my day, about how pleased for us everyone was. On impulse I looked up wedding dresses on my phone.




"Can you sign please?" the delivery man asked me a few weeks later. I duly obliged and took the bulky package into my bedroom.

"I need you to get out!" I said to Kevin, "You’re not meant to see me in this, it's bad luck!"

I picked up his body and lugged it into the living room.

"No peeking!" I yelled and shut the bedroom door behind me. I tried it on and stroked the beading. Understated and elegant. I carefully wrapped it back in its tissue paper and placed it at the top of the wardrobe next to the bumps. I’d bought them in three different sizes for the various trimesters. They were a little less realistic than I’d have liked, but with 20% off if I spent £200 or more, how could I not?

JASMIN NAHAR is a writer and editor based in London. A graduate of Faber Academy’s ‘Writing the Novel’ course, her fiction has previously been longlisted for the Mo Siewcharran Prize. Her writing has also been published in a number of national newspapers.