Dollbaby
Amarie Fox
We are going back in time, locking ourselves in our little girl rooms where the walls are pink and there are daisy chains along the ceiling, just to find these sisters of ours, these versions of ourselves. Our favorite is packed in a box, banished to the back of the closet, bound with tissue paper––to hide her nakedness and headlessness. Our brothers stole her, tore her clothes off, spun her around by the hair, crying she was the witch. Off with her head.
Before we can stop we are dismantling the dolls. Pulling on their perfect arms and legs, plucking body parts like flower petals, singing he loves me he loves me not he loves me he loves me not. We climb from the window, digging holes beneath the bougainvillea, making tiny graves. Thorns slice our forearms as punishment. Blood smears on the smooth plastic and it really starts to feel like murder. Swallowing the sick down, the guilt, the shame, we hurry back inside, scramble to reattach limbs and heads, but what we end up with is not what we expect.
There is no ugly assemblage of mismatching parts. No freaks. No horrible Frankenstein monsters. Only the same dolls we remember from childhood. Beautiful, identical replicas of one another. Painted on smiles, deadeyes, void of holes and nipples, without scars or beauty marks, completely empty on the inside –what we never would be, what we never could be.
AMARIE FOX is a writer and witch. Her work has appeared in NANO Fiction, Metazen, and Paper Darts. Recently, she was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. More information at: http://amariefox.tumblr.com.
