Page 16 of She’s a Doll

And now I was in the body of a doll.

A. Fucking. Doll.

It was all so unfair.

The stupid way I’d been killed, the arsehole who’d done it, my dumb-as-shit decision to cling on to something, anything, rather than let myself slip away. I could’ve been destined for a very respectable afterlife. Heaven? Probably not. I didn’t think I’d done enough to deserve that. But this? Limbo would’ve been better than this. Or reincarnation. The great soul-recycling factory in the sky. I think I would’ve done well as a single-celled organism, brainless, floating around in warm water all day. People pay top dollar for that sort of thing.

Honestly, even the nothingness I’d always assumed was waiting for me after death would’ve been better than this.

I wanted to tear the lace from my face, scrape the rosy paint off my cheeks, and yank out my synthetic blonde curls. I wanted to smash my porcelain head against the bookshelf and scream until all my stuffing burst out.

But I couldn’t.

My head throbbed, my eyes burned, my chest ached, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t cry. I wanted to call out to my grandma, but my mouth was painted on, forever locked into a small, shy smile. The awfulness of that consumed me, and the darkness deepened.

But still those questions tugged at me, and, like the strings of a puppet, they pulled me back.

Why did Kyle do that to me?

Why couldn’t I stop him?

What’s going to happen now?

This time, when I saw the lace, I didn’t spiral. I held on to the vision of it, picking apart every detail. Floral, frayed, and thin enough that I could just make out the room beyond. The haphazard stack of old birdcages, Grandma’s sewing machine, an abandoned project lying on the bedplate, and the threadbare green carpet.

I half expected to see myself on that carpet.

My body, lying where I left it.

But it was empty.

It was also day, sunlight streaming in to puddle on the floor, so bright it hurt to look at.

Time had passed. Perhaps a lot of time. Perhaps too much time.

Through the flowery white of my veil, I peered toward the clock hanging on the far wall. It was a cheap plastic thing, which made no sense because there were a ton of much nicer clocks in the kitchen cupboard, some of which even worked. Weirdly, the mundanity of that thought centered me. I held on to it as the clockface limped into focus.

Five past midday. I watched it for a minute, then two. It stayed at five past midday.

Cheap clocks. Ugly and unreliable.

I tried to turn my head, to see more of the room, but I couldn’t. I could feel my stitches, my stuffing, and how it intersected with my porcelain, but I couldn’t manipulate anything. I was trapped, frozen, pinned down . . .

I beat back the choking froth of terror and kept looking. Everything kept swimming in and out of focus, the familiar four walls turned sinister and alien by the distortion of my glass eyes and the haze of lace.

I spotted a fly, fat and brown with black hair and red eyes. It hung in the air, wings frozen mid-beat.

My attention snapped back to the clock.

Five past midday.

It hadn’t stopped. Time had froz⁠—

The second that thought entered my head, the clock’s hands started spinning, whirling around the face so fast they blurred. The fly vanished with a deep, angry buzz.

I tried to suck in a breath, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t breathe. I can’t breathe. It hurts. Terror shot through me. I tried to take another breath, this time to scream. The veil sucked up against my face, sharp, fast. I fell back into the darkness, choking on my impossible scream, on my panic.

For a while, the storm had me. Fear, rage, loss. Slowly, the pieces of me re-formed, fractured and fragile, but whole enough to peer back into the world of the living, back through lace-fogged eyes, back at that clock.