Page 73 of She’s a Doll

It looked like a dinosaur. The Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park smashing through the electric fence and posing as she delivered her first iconic roar. Except there was nothing powerful or triumphant about the kangaroo. It wasn’t breaking free. It wasn’t going to kill anyone. It wasn’t going to save anyone in the final act of the film either.

It was dead. Not just dead, destroyed. Crushed, broken, and left to rot.

The awfulness of that choked me, strangled me, mauled me. The brutality and relentlessness of my grief somehow shocking all over again. I felt small. I felt destroyed. I felt the same way I’d felt when I stuck myself into this doll body, back before I knew I could move, before I’d adapted to the sickening stops and starts of the clock.

Somehow I also felt the numb hopelessness I’d felt in the glass cabinet in Trash N’ Treasure. I’d lost. There was nothing I could do to save myself. There was nothing I could do to save the kangaroo either. It was done. It’d been done for a long time. It was stupid to think anything that devastating could ever be undone.

Split in two, lost in both grief and nothingness, I did the only thing I could do. I kept going.

The fog lifted. The traffic thickened. I passed by a roadworker with a slow/stop lollipop sign, the job I used to do before starting my business administration course. He filmed me with his phone but didn’t try to scoop me up. I watched him disappear in the reflective bit of plastic in my driver’s side mirror.

The car finally ran out of battery, only a few meters from the Pet Cemetery sign made from a wooden pallet and the canvas of an old wool bale. I climbed out of the car and half walked, half crawled down the short dirt path.

The pet cemetery itself was a tiny triangular slice taken out of a larger paddock, spotted with a motley collection of gravestones, some polished stone statues of sleeping cats and dogs, others just sticks with laminated photos stuck onto them. The grass was yellow and interwoven with thistles, blooming purple and white.

The fence between the cemetery and the paddock next to it had fallen, and a flock of sheep were in among the gravestones, tearing at the overgrown grass. A few raised their heads and watched with elongated pupils as I stumbled from one grave to the other, reading the inscriptions. After a while, clearly deciding I wasn’t a threat, they bowed their heads and went back to eating.

Eventually, I found him, at the very back row.

The esteemed Colonel Cookie-Dough “Cookie” McQuinn.

Lover of liver treats and belly rubs, sworn foe of vacuum cleaners everywhere, gentlest soul ever put in a spiky collar.

He never learned to play dead, so when we saw him, we knew.

The stone was a simple, uneven rock that looked like it was set by hand over the grave. The words had been carved deep and clear with an amateurish hand. Below them a single, giant paw print was already turning green with lichen.

I sat down next to the stone, startling a huntsman spider that had been hiding in the grass nearby. It scurried away, looking like a strange, loping, eight-legged dog as it raced off through the grass.

Cookie had tried to warn me about Kyle. He would’ve saved me, if he could. He didn’t deserve to die and be left behind.

Time swirled forward. The sky bruised, the traffic on the highway thickened, and a sheep shoved me aside with its nose to get the grass I was sitting on. I let myself be shoved, slumping further against the ground and watching as the sheep devoured the grass with brutal efficiency, head jerking as it tore the blades from the earth.

It was gangly and white with yellow eyes and ears heavy with tags. It had also been recently shorn, the lines of the clippers still visible in its wool. I hoped that meant it had been bred for its wool and not for its meat.

Eventually, as the sun set, the flock finished stripping the cemetery of grass and filed one by one back through the hole in the fence, heading in a long train toward the distant shimmer of dam water.

I imagined myself rotting into the earth, fabric shot through with worms, head crumbling away, finally dying and becoming dust and dirt and resting forever alongside Cookie. There were worse fates, I supposed.

At least this way, I would be with family.

26

Days passed.

Then weeks.

The sky rolled overhead, dark and starry one moment, bright baby-boy blue the next. Clouds charged, like soldiers in an invading army, from one horizon to the other, then back, scattered and broken, in full-blown retreat. The passing traffic was an unnatural high-pitched scream that morphed into a dragon’s growl as the time stream slowed.

The huntsman I’d seen when I first arrived at Cookie’s grave appeared to be a permanent resident of the graveyard. Or, at the very least, a frequent visitor. It emerged from time to time, scurrying over the tombstones and stalking through the yellowed grass like a lioness on the savanna, hunting down crickets, beetles, and, once, a small frog.

I decided to call her Claudia.

Claudia lost her wariness of me after a while, coming close enough for me to see the subtle stripes on her legs and the dignified, almost pensive set of her mandibles. Once, early in the morning, she climbed up my slumped torso, long legs gentle, to drink dew out of the open cavity in my head. I didn’t mind. I was happy to be useful. Besides, Claudia deserved the drink. She was a good spider, long and lanky with brown fur and a large fuzzy face, not unlike Cookie. I tried to reach out, to pat her, but all I could manage was a feeble jerk.

She scurried back and hid beneath a nearby rock, a baleful eight-eyed glare aimed in my direction.

I’m sorry, I thought. I shouldn’t be here. I know. This is your place, not mine. I don’t know why I’m here.