Page 24 of She’s a Doll

She’d snort and roll her eyes. “Oscar Wilde. That boy was such a self-important little brat. All the best writers are, I suppose. But still.”

It was a conversation we’d had a hundred times. A thousand. Even just thinking about it felt like settling into a routine, comfortable and well worn.

Everything about Grandma was comfortable and well worn.

Her smiles, her sass, her tattoos, which were old enough to have transformed from hard lines into blooming watercolors.

I owed her so much. She raised me after my mum⁠—her daughter⁠—died. I was pretty sure that was when the house started to fill up. Her place had never been Spartan, but once I was there, stuff just kept coming and coming and coming. I was a kid. I didn’t think it was bad, just weird. I never talked to her about it.

There was a lot we never got to talk about.

But I guess that’s what death is. A conversation interrupted. A thread left hanging. A long, uncertain note as the pianist turns the page and realizes that the song is over, cut short a couple of bars before the crescendo.

10

I wasn’t entirely certain how I ended up at the tip, but I was pretty sure Auntie Dawn had something to do with it. After all, throwing stuff out, even broken stuff, wasn’t exactly Grandma’s style. But, with time charging by as fast as it was, and with me being several clicks beyond “messed up” and safely in the realm of “catastrophically fucked,” I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was, I’d been lying on the living room floor, day and night flickering by, sounds of shouting and crying and barking smashing together, hellish and high-pitched. Then, in a blink, all was quiet, I was in a shoebox, and a guy with razor burn was staring down at me with wide eyes.

“Holy shit. Dude. Check this out. It’s like . . . a broken doll or something.”

“Do you think it’s worth anything?”

“I mean . . . maybe? Look at it, though. It’s gnarly. All gross and smashed up. Also, this box was duct-taped closed, had ‘Do not open’ written on it, and is half filled with Bible pages?”

“Hmm. Probably fine. Put it over there. Paul might take it.”

Paul⁠—a middle-aged man in a bright-red shirt⁠—did take me, along with a stack of old furniture, several boxes of yellow-paged books, and eight trash bags full of toys. The logo on his shirt said Trash N’ Treasure. I wondered what he’d been drinking to think there was any hope of me graduating from the former to the latter. Whatever it was, it must’ve been strong, because when we arrived at the titular Trash N’ Treasure⁠—a thrift shop I vaguely remembered driving by on the edge of town⁠—he arranged me and all my broken pieces in the locked glass cabinet by the cash register.

A puzzle, waiting to be put together was written on the sign sticky-taped to the window. An optimistic bit of marketing on Paul’s part. If it’d been me, I probably would’ve just written Broken old junk. Or, more likely, never even attempted to sell a smashed-up old doll to begin with. Despite the aura of a locked glass cabinet, I was pretty damn sure I wasn’t worth much. Yes, I looked old-timey, and perhaps parts of me were, but other parts had a distinctly mass-produced vibe. And deep down (or perhaps not that deep down) he must’ve known it, because the price written on the sticky-taped piece of paper was $19.95.

Trash N’ Treasure was exactly what you’d expect. Rows of old furniture, racks of clothes, and shelves of miscellaneous items. I watched customers blur, then creep, then blur as they moved through the store. The lights turning on, then off, then on again. The most popular item was pants, go figure. There were always at least two people at that rack, flicking through jeans. I had a good vantage point from where I sat. Even with my cracked eye, I could tell that low-rises were back.

I moved, of course.

That was the only power I had, and I wasn’t going to give it up.

Moving also allowed me to take stock, fill out a mental damage report.

I’d lost an arm at some point. My other one was hanging by a thread, literally. Both my legs had been reduced to shattered stumps, my body was floppy from lack of stuffing, and my head . . . I wasn’t sure how much of that I had left. Not a lot, if I had to guess. I couldn’t feel the prickle of my synthetic hair anymore, and I was pretty sure my one remaining eye was cracked through the middle. The only part of my face left undamaged was my lips, still trapped in that small, shy smile.

The thought made me want to bash my face into the ground, to reduce that smile to pieces and then grind those pieces to dust.

Instead, I used my one arm, snapped off at the wrist, to drag myself around the shelf, pressing up against the glass some days, lying in the corner on others.

Eventually, someone must have noticed, because my sign changed.

A puzzle, waiting to be put together A spooky haunted doll $19.95 $12.50

Weirdly, that seemed to work. More faces pressed up against my window, anyway. Some curious, some scoffing, some with a strange, wide-eyed sort of intensity. I listened to a couple of kids debate whether or not they should buy me for an upcoming Halloween party. In the end, they went with a bingo ball cage filled with numbered Ping-Pong balls instead.

I couldn’t really blame them.

After all, when it came to playing the part of the possessed toy, I wasn’t doing a very good job. I didn’t jump up and dance, shout obscenities, or do any of the other things you’d expect from a knockoff Chucky. Most of the time, I just lay there, watching the world through the glass doors of the cabinet like it was a TV screen and all the people in the shop were the characters in some long, boring soap opera.

The employees all thought Paul was an arsehole (they were right).

Paul thought all the employees were talking behind his back (he was right).

The customers were always right (they weren’t).