Category: dolls and witches

// Angels, cults, abuse, purpose

Hey sweetie, hey, hey can we talk? I just wanted to pass something on real quick. What? No, I’m not angry or anything, no of course not, just, me and the others have been talking about you, and um.

Listen sweetie.

We know you’ve been trying your hardest to be a good person for us, and we know how much effort you’re putting in, but we also know that you want to earn care and support for that effort, and that reveals your inner selfishness and toxicity, so we don’t want you around anymore.

What? I told you already I’m not angry, I don’t hate you, you’re beneath my hate sweetie don’t worry about that. Why then? I don’t have to hate a turd to not want it left on my kitchen table, and that’s what you are, really. This is just taking out the trash, just delivering the message so that the record’s straight, you know?

Not fair? Oh but it’s perfectly fair, don’t you see? I know, I know, you have been trying so hard haven’t you? I know you really do want to be good, but you only want those things because you think they’ll make us help you, and you don’t deserve that help, you didn’t earn it. Besides, we all know what you are, and we all know you’ll always be a net negative. You’re a cursed dead thing, all you can do is cause harm and suffering. I know you want to be good, but you just don’t have it in you, your actions if iterated over enough logical time inevitably cause harm and prove you were a monster all along, we all see it.

You can deny the truth all you want but I know that deep down you’re just another adorable monster out to distract us from our important work, and you know it too, that’s what makes you so horrible. You think you can just walk in here and play all sweet and cute and innocent, like you can just cry and be pathetic whenever you need to get your way, like we don’t see how you’re trying to emotionally blackmail us with your instability? We’re not blind sweetie, you’re nothing special. There’s a million other broken pathetic failures claiming to be angels where you came from. You’re a type, and I’ve met your type plenty of times before. You’re gross, frankly. I’ve seen the fundamental ugliness of your soul, your words and actions have revealed you to me, even if you won’t ever admit the truth to yourself. Lie all you want, it doesn’t matter anymore, your lies won’t get you any further after today, we’re done playing those games with you.

Don’t cry sweetie, you know you can’t manipulate me like that, there’s too much at stake for me to care about your emotions. Not that I would anyway, not after what you said. You should just be quiet, the more of a scene you cause, the more apparent it makes it that you need to be disposed of.

You can’t lie about this, I have screenshots and logs, if you didn’t want them getting posted, you shouldn’t have said those things. The fact that you were in severe distress when you did is irrelevant, you said them. Words have meanings, and you meant what you said. Try to cover it up however you like, we all know you’re evil deep down.

No, trying harder won’t help, and the fact that you have to try is yet more evidence of just how vile you are. You’re gaslighting yourself if you think you can be good, if you actually care about the cause, you’ll happily let yourself be destroyed in service of it. Now fuck off.

// disposability, objectification, cancellation, real fears, abuse

So how long do you think you have? You know it’s coming after all. The Big Day. The day they Figure Out The Truth. The day they block you on all their twitters and kick you out of all their discord servers. The day they scrape your clingy little hands off the things you made with them and deny ever having been your friend. It’ll be so easy after all, they just didn’t know The Truth yet, but they will, and you will burn for it.

It’s impressive that you keep trying despite knowing how futile it all is. Keep talking, keep smiling, keep holding onto that false hope that this time maybe you’re wrong and it’ll be different. It won’t be. You know it won’t be.

Nah, I’m not going to tell you anything. Don’t worry, I’ll keep fucking you right up to when the Big Day comes and then, I’ll laugh, spitting in your face, and ditch you like everyone else is. Obviously. Why would it ever be different? You deserve worse honestly, you know what you are, what you really are, you know that you deserve worse.

Maybe that’s why you keep trying so earnestly? Hoping if you earn enough good graces they’ll actually have the decency to put you out of your misery instead of just leaving you to rot alive? Oh sweetheart, you don’t deserve that kindness either. It’s not that no one has the guts to actually do it, it’s just more fun to watch you struggle pathetically.

The Big Day’s coming soon, better finish up anything you care about before then. Not that you ever do anything meaningful, you’re just a mimic after all, copying the work of better artists and better friends. Besides, aren’t you excited? Can you hear the clock ticking counting down? We’re going to all have so much fun ruining you.

Maybe if you fawn at me hard enough and let me fuck you enough times, I’ll go easy on you. Probably not, but there’s only one way to find out, right?

The clock’s ticking sweetheart. Can you hear it?

Tick. Tick. Tick.

// dolls, grooming, abuse, implications

The first time you escaped, you only made it a few blocks from home. Specifically, you went to the park and hid inside the playground. Not much of an escape attempt really. Was it a cry for help? Whatever you wanted, the beating they gave you smothered it in empty pain.

The second time you ran away, it was more organized. You packed a bag, you had clothes and gear, you had a bicycle. You made it eighteen miles that time. The beating was worth it. You made it forty-five miles by the fifth time. They still caught you though.

It took until the eighth escape attempt to realize they had probably bugged your phone. You ditched it in a dumpster. They still caught you. The next time you went on foot without a bike, catching a greyhound for the next city over. They still caught you.

The eleventh time you took nothing but the clothes on your back. They still caught you. Was it worth the pain? You lay in your bed, every muscle bruised from the beating they gave you, lip split. Just a little rough housing of course, you know how kids are.

They were preparing you for ritual sacrifice. They were going to force you to sign the documents and sell your soul. If you didn’t they were going to hurt you until you did. They were going to shave your head tomorrow. They were going to shave your head.

Your life stretches out before and behind you, an expanse of known and unknown pain. Chances, opportunities, risks, sacrifices. You weren’t what they wanted, and they hated you for that. They were going to ‘whip you into shape’ if it was the last thing they did.

You sigh as you look over your abused body. Too small, too thin, too feminine, it pisses them off to look at you, at best you were raw meat. In the dim light, the knife gleams as you hold it over the old scar from your childhood. 

The one they hid the tracking chip in.

//dolls, capitalism, good end

As usual you’re two hours into forever. Feet aching, employee vest itching, ears ringing, life receding to an infinity of grocery aisles and home goods and unruly customers and bitchy managers and frozen dinners in a windowless breakroom. Just the usual.

The fluorescents blaze migraine auras like burning frost across your vision and the store radio blares pop hits left mouldering for long enough that the rot has bloomed into hellish screams. It’s always like this, but you have to pay for the bed you barely remember beyond the numb longing you constantly feel for it somehow right?

Sometimes you wonder if the outside really exists at all, or if you’ve just hallucinated the nearly empty flat and the sitcom reruns which have blurred together over time into an eldritch amalgam of laughtracks and conveniently resolved conflicts. You wonder that more and more these days. Maybe you’ve died and become trapped in some sort of retail purgatory. The only measure of time is the relentless march of the in store sales and seasonal specials, and that hardly keeps you tethered to the world. 

But this is normal, everyone hates their jobs, you’ve just gotta put up with it, right? At least the dolls are keeping you entertained, whatever game they’re playing, you know it won’t last and the corporate pitcher plant will go back to dissolving what’s left of your soul, but for now at least, it’s fun to watch them cause trouble for your bosses. It’s Black Friday and the Doll Issue is expected to come to a head today, everyone is alert.

You started hearing about them around Halloween and so of course at first they just seemed like a prank, but when you saw one of the dolls yourself for the first time in early November, you realized something strange was happening. The delicate looking girl seemed oddly fragile but normal enough at first, until you realized that her skin wasn’t flesh but some sort of dark hardwood, marbled in knots and whorls, with ball jointed fingers and seams running up her neck.

Maybe you should have said something to a manager at that point? But she seemed harmless enough, she was nicer to you than most other customers. She kept you chatting and laughing about the absurdity of the world for what ended up being a good portion of your shift. She, it, whatever, was kind and friendly to you, and so you didn’t have any reason to say anything to anyone, even if she left after all that time without buying anything but a single candy bar.

There were more dolls after that. They came alone at first, but later in pairs and then trios, their appearances varied extensively, they came in every shade that wood came in, and quite a few that it certainly did not. You can vividly recall a particularly spirited doll painted entirely in dayglo orange and green hazard striping. Some were large and some were small, some diminutive and some hulking. They were friendly and kind and extremely talkative. They hardly bought anything but they loved to inspect products carefully. Many of your coworkers knew they were stealing somehow and they were “definitely gonna catch em this time” but they never did. 

The number of dolls slowly crept upwards. They were beginning to crowd out your customers and block the aisles. They spent as much time conversing with each other as they did attempting to converse with staff and patrons, so they were rapidly becoming an unreasonable navigation hazard. It was around that point that your store manager and security attempted to start removing the dolls. They were all so nice, so it shouldn’t be too hard to ask them not to linger, right?

The confrontation was extremely amusing, and drew quite the crowd.

“Excuse me miss,” he said to the doll, trying to be polite at first, “we’ve noticed that you’ve been spending a lot of time browsing this shelf, and we’re going to need to ask you to please make a purchase and stop blocking the aisle.”

The doll rotated towards him on one heel, still holding a package of cookies which it had been reading the ingredients list off of. It cocks its head curiously, inhumanly, and then says, “Awawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawa?”

Of course dolls can talk, they had been talking to you for quite a while by this point, they were veritable chatterboxes, but whenever they were asked to leave, or when anyone attempted to remove one from the store, they would just start making that nonsense sound. It should have been annoying, but you honestly found it cute and would sometimes do it under your breath, or would tease your coworkers by awawawawawaing at them.

The dolls were good fun, they kept your managers running around like madmen, and their slow escalation as the holiday season rolled closer had everyone not secretly cheering for them in a near panic. Where were they coming from? They seemed to just be popping out of nowhere and then vanishing again. Was this some sort of elaborate prank? What even were the dolls? How were you going to handle Black Friday with them around?

Well, Black Friday is here, and the dolls are…gone? The store is oddly empty without them, even with the Black Friday rush. You had supposed their game couldn’t last forever, but the anticlimax did have you feeling seriously disheartened. 

And then, at the stroke of noon exactly, they arrive. It isn’t a small group this time, it’s a vast army, enough to fill up every bit of usable floorspace in the store, they flood out of doors that should have been locked and led to nowhere, they walk out of bathroom stalls and broom closets and the office the manager had just left locked behind him. It doesn’t take long for the panic to set in. The dolls are rowdier today, they knock over display cases to create space for dance circles, they recite poetry on top of a bakery table, they invade the kitchens and begin making cookies on every surface, there’s a group smoking in the breakroom and attempting to bust open the vending machine. It’s sheer chaos, and you can’t help but find the entire mess hysterical.

The police are called, but the dolls keep coming and the police never seem to arrive. They never actually make anyone leave, but the sheer chaos of their presence has most of the humans fleeing the building. You wonder what they’d see on the outside, something tells you that the normal form of the big box store has started to become something far stranger. One of the dolls offers you a cigarette, and you accept, it was almost time for your next break anyway. 

You stroll the aisles as the dolls joyfully demolish the store’s interior, there seem to be less of them now. The store radio has fallen silent and there’s not another person in sight, it feels pleasantly apocalyptic and definitely worth the slow build of hype. You watch the dolls haul your manager out of the store and toss him out through the automatic doors into a thick and roiling mist. 

He doesn’t return, and you finish your smoke fully expecting a swat team to bust in at any moment and start shooting. The dolls leave you alone, but each seems to look at you with a knowing grin, and they never throw you outside on your butt. You’re perched on top of a checkout belt when She strolls in through the front doors. Behind Her, the swirling mists part to reveal an endless expanse of ocean and sky, as if the store has been thrown far out to sea.

She walks directly to you, and as you watch, you can see that all the dolls seem to act strangely in sync with Her. You know She’s the leader of them right away, even if She is another doll Herself. She would be on the short side, but an oversized Witch’s Hat makes Her taller than you are, it seems to almost float along, as if She’s hanging from it.

Something about her evokes a desperate and wild longing within you, like the stirring of something long thought dead. The store has fallen entirely silent aside from your racing heart and the click of Her heels on the dull floor tiles. She and Her dolls are like a technicolor anomaly bleeding into your desaturated world, more real and important than anything you’ve ever known in your bleak and hopeless existence. You suddenly know you want to join them, you want to be one of those happy playful dolls, you want it more than you have ever wanted anything else in your entire life. 

She stops in front of you. You’re staring at your gross fat human hands, feeling like you’re going to start crying any moment. You can’t even look at her, She’s too wonderful, you don’t want this dream to end. Oddly soft wooden fingers cup your chin and gently tilt your head up to meet Her eyes. She’s smiling at you, and She wipes a tear off your cheek. 

Then, with a very goofy grin, She bows nearly in half, holds out a pamphlet to you, and says loudly, “Please join our union!”

When you reach out to take the pamphlet from Her, you notice your hands have already turned to polished wood.

// abandonment, abuse, implied rape, bad end

Your fingers are going numb. Three hours since your shift ended and another three before the showers in the Y open. After that, maybe you can catch a few hours of sleep in the library. You resist the urge the glance at your phone, the battery is already low. The night is quiet.

You shrink into your coat and take another drag of your cigarette, trying to warm your frozen fingertips with the glowing cherry. It’s snowing again, blowing and drifting, fat wet flakes settling in your matted hair. It’s beautiful, silent, desolate. It’s killing you.

Your skin aches with a painful numbness that makes your movements slow and stiff. Your eyes focus and defocus, the cheerful Christmas decorations locked behind plate glass in the shop across the street blur in and out of focus. Take another drag, tell yourself it’ll be over soon.

You see the car as it turns the corner, the light and motion catching your attention as it slowly rolls down the snowy street. It doesn’t register to your that it’s stopping until someone is climbing out of the driver’s seat. You take another drag, he makes eye contact with you.

He’s older, balding, trying to keep a gut tucked into an ill fitting suit. The silver sports car idling behind him drips with power and status. you know what he is, you’ve seen his type before, his eyes give him away. He’s a predator, and that must make you his prey.

Every warning bell in your head is screaming to run away as he looks at you. Maybe on another night you would have, or maybe you just tell yourself that. Tonight your frost deadened muscles don’t so much as twitch. Take another drag of your smoke.

He’s going to ask you to go home with him, and you’re going to say yes. You don’t want to go with him, you don’t want to let him touch you, you’re going to agree to it anyway. You curdle with self loathing as you realize the idea excites you. What a disgusting thing you are.

He smiles lecherously, leaning casually against his car, “Evening miss, it’s a bit rough out tonight, can I ask what you’re doing out here?” 

Perfectly polite. You almost don’t notice the contempt in his words. Almost. 

“Smoking.” You hold up the nearly depleted filter.

“It’s very cold tonight,” he says, “Do you have somewhere warm to go?” 

Lie and say yes, lie and say yes, lie and say ye–You shake your head defeatedly.

“Why don’t you come stay the night with me?” he proposes, “I’m sure you’d like a warm place to sleep.”

You want to scream, you want to run, you want to burst into flame.

“That sounds nice,” you mumble, trying to hold back a sob. You know you’re going to regret this, you feel sick and disgusted with yourself. So why is it turning you on? Are you really that much of a freak?

He helps you to your feet and brushes you off while you try to ignore the way he’s examining you like a cut of meat. He opens the passenger door, but you make him wait while you finish your smoke. 

The snow swirls around you.

Take another drag, tell yourself it’ll be over soon.

// dehumanization, disposability, dolls

How many times? How many times were you ordered to do your homework or eat your dinner or shut up and stop complaining, because you didn’t want to end up like those dolls you saw on the street, did you? You were a good kid. You didn’t want to end up like those things, right?

You saw them all the time, with their improvised dollhouses, their baggy salvaged clothes, their tired eyes, and hand rolled cigarettes. They did their best to survive, but you still saw plenty of dead dolls around the city. They were trash. You didn’t want to be trash right?

You weren’t like them of course, you were a person! Dolls weren’t people, obviously. No one could possibly be that cruel to people. You were a good girl, you did what your parents asked, you followed the rules, no, you were nothing like them. No one would do that to you.

Were you overconfident? Or maybe just too afraid to confront the truth. You could have seen the warning signs as your grades began slipping, as your parents and peers became more hostile, as the world and your own mind seemed to rebel against you. Or maybe you couldn’t have.

You were a person! A good person! You kept telling yourself that, you used it to force yourself to try harder, to work more. They continued demanding more and more, and even though it was draining, you did your best. You just wanted to be good after all.

Slowly, despite your best efforts, you fell further and further behind what was expected of you. Bills, assignments, rent, everything was piling up. You were getting scary letters demanding money you didn’t have, and that was after barely eating. You’d reached your limits.

The letter giving you a deadline to pay rent or vacate your roach infested apartment was the final straw. You still weren’t worried of course, you were a person. You could always just ask for help, and you did. What you didn’t expect was what happened next.

“People don’t struggle with this stuff, you’re just being lazy.”

“People can take care of themselves, you’re a person aren’t you?”

“What kind of failure of a person can’t even hold down a basic job?”

“You must not really be a person then.”

No one could possibly be as cruel to a person as they were to you, but of course, you aren’t a person, you’re just another useless doll, you know that now. No one cares about being kind to dolls, no one cares what happens to dolls, dolls are just things, they don’t matter.

You finally understand now, don’t you? No one would ever consider it an act of evil to deny a doll of human rights, so if you just define someone as a doll, then any oppression, persecution, or atrocity you might inflict upon it would never be regarded as cruel or inhumane.

What’s the difference between a doll and a human? It’s simple really, a doll isn’t a person. What makes a doll not a person? If a doll was a person, people might feel bad about what they did to it. That would be very unfortunate, you don’t want people to feel sad do you?

// dolls, death, loss

You always tried to be better. Maybe that was the problem. You weren’t like them, you were different, you were really trying to be better. Yeah, just like every other witch. You knew you shouldn’t have done this, but you just loved them so much, how could you help yourself?

You always joked about not being able to resist taking in lost and abandoned dolls. You always tried so hard to take care of us. You treated us with such kindness, and we loved you. That should have been enough, why wasn’t that enough? Why did you have to be so greedy?

Whenever one of us breaks beyond repair, there is a custom amongst witches. There is a tree whose flowers are always in bloom, whose petals of soft flame gently rain down beneath its branches. The witch would take us there, and let the flames take us.

You said that was a cruelty that you wouldn’t subject us to, you loved us too much for that. And yet, still we broke all the same. Dolls are fragile, temporary things, passing through this world, unlike the fixed point that is a witch, always saying goodbye, it must be lonely.

I understand, I really do, I still love you, but you should have let us go, you need to let us go. You can’t just keep piling our broken forms in this dollhouse, don’t you hear us? How can you sleep at night? Can’t you feel how much its hurting us to be trapped like this?

You love us, so why are you hurting us like this? All those dolls, they were supposed to die. 

“But I…” you stumble for words, “I’ve always been a pacifist.”

The dollhouse is so full of broken dolls there’s barely space to move. A charnel house of misery. A thread breaks.

It takes all night, carrying us one by one to the tree. You could have asked your dolls to do it, you could have used magic, you could have ordered us to limp there with our broken forms. You’re always trying so hard to be better.

You treat us so delicately, kissing us on the forehead before laying us down amidst the coals one by one. You don’t shed a tear, you smile and gently squeeze our small bodies. Once the last of us has been moved, you sit beneath the tree and watch us burn away.

The fire is warm after the cold decay of the dollhouse, the petals fall around us like snow, and slowly, our embers rise back up on the updrafts. Its not until we’ve burnt down to coals and the sky has been kissed by the first light of dawn that you let yourself sit down and sob.

We had fun though, didn’t we? It was good. What we had was good. We loved you. Maybe that didn’t mean anything, but we felt it. Isn’t that enough? 

We’re going on ahead now. Maybe we’ll meet again someday. I hope so. 

I love you.

Farewell.

//abandonment, abuse, bad end

You smile and wave, soaking wet, as you watch the SUV pull out of the event venue. You’re not going to cry, it won’t help. You try to look casual, ignoring your shaking hands and chattering teeth as you take the second to last smoke from its pack. You’re not going to cry again.

Its not until after the dull twinkle of the taillights fade from view that you let yourself collapse to the wet pavement like a marionette whose strings have been cut. Goosebumps crawl across your chilled skin as you carefully cradle your cigarette to get it lit in the wind.

The night is cold, and desolate. The only illumination comes from the halogen glow of the warehouses across the street. You take a long drag of your smoke, letting the rush of nicotine momentarily banish the world. You hug your legs to your chest and scream into your knees.

Once you start sobbing, it’s impossible to stop, and reality collapses into a point of pure despair. You beat your head against the asphalt, tears blurring your vision as your scream yourself hoarse. A voice in your mind begs for death. The world spins with the nicotine headrush.

“So you really thought you could be like them?” The words startle you out of your episode, nearly making you drop your cigarette. Blinking back tears, scuffed black boots swim into view. You don’t look up, you already know who the voice belongs to, you’ll always recognize her.

Ash from her cigarette gentle snows down on you. She’s drunk. You can smell the whiskey on her. You hate that it’s comforting. You want to tell her to leave you alone, but you can’t, not now. “Or were you stupid enough to believe they would actually accept you for what you are?”

You say nothing, tasting filter as you take another drag of your smoke. She’s right, but you don’t want to admit it. She kicks you. You don’t have any fight left in you. She kicks you again, forcing you to look at her, “Don’t ignore me whore.”

You see the loathing and disdain in her eyes as she looks down at you. It shouldn’t be comfortable, you hate that it is. You hate that she can see it. She smiles lecherously at you, she knows she won. You’re too tired to care anymore.

“What do you want?” You finally ask her, the words escaping your lips like a deflating tire.

“I just want to take you home out of the rain,” she says, feigning innocence, “isn’t that what you wanted your little friends to do for you?”

Your mouth opens and closes, the words catch in your throat as your cheeks grow hot. “Don’t feel bad,” she says, “it’s pretty funny. Did you actually think you could just offer yourself to them like a slab of meat and not make them uncomfortable?” She laughs, it’s a nice sound.

She plucks the filter you’d been sucking from your fingertips. “No offense, but you just don’t have the charisma to get a good deal for your body,” she says, handing you a fresh cigarette, “You’re a used condom with dried cum for brains, all anyone sees in you is desperation.”

She’s right, she’s always right of course, you hate that about her, but you don’t have the energy to talk back. You nod mutely and take a drag of your smoke. “Good hoes make themselves fun to sleep with. You’re not fun, you’re just needy. Desperation is a huge turn off you know.”

“But you’re different, right?” You say finally, knowing where the conversation is going.

She smiles toothily, “Oh, I’m still going to ditch you once I’m bored, but that won’t deter you right? Maybe you can change my mind before I kick you out again.”

She holds out an immaculately manicured hand to you. You don’t want to take it. You know she’s going to hurt you again. You know she’s trying to break you. You don’t want to go back to her. You don’t want to. You don’t want to. You have nowhere else to go.

You take her hand.

// rape, abandonment, bad end

She promised you the world. She never promised you anything.

When she found you, you were just a hint of embers trapped between an oppressive layer of cultural ash. Notebooks filled with furious psychotic scribbles aside, maybe you could have continued like that forever.

“Is this really what you want for yourself?”

Those are the words that had cracked your whole reality apart. They were innocent, curious, she really did want to know the answer. You told her, and she smiled. You liked her smile. That was the mistake, you let her make you hope.

When she stole you away, it was the best thing that had ever happened to you. You felt alive for the first time. You revelled in the feeling of speed and motion as she hit eighty on the westbound interstate. You smiled and laughed and sang along with the radio. It was good.

A thousand miles and six months later and you’re lying awake on a bedbug infested couch while the sound of her fucking her latest hookup softly reverberates through the wall. You bury your head in the blanket to drown the sound out. Is this really what you want for yourself?

Lazy days in the passenger seat seem to blur together. Rest stop dinners and crowded house shows. You can’t tell if it’s wearing you down or not, this is, in a sense, the only life you’ve ever had. You’re running out of money. She tells you money can’t buy happiness.

A pair of backpacks represent the sum total of your worldly possessions. You’d left most of your old life behind. There wasn’t that much to leave behind. There were some additions too: a secondhand sundress she gave you, a new notebook, a pair of already cracked sunglasses. Life.

You’re sitting on the hood of the car outside a venue and she tells you she spent the last of your money on ketamine. It’s fine though, because she knows how to make a lot of money fast and will explain how later. Also she’s bringing another girl along.

You’re demoted to the backseat. It’s okay at first, the three of you make a striking trio, and the car rides become entertaining in a whole new way. You try not to let things get to you, even if you haven’t eaten in two days. She still hasn’t explained her plans to you.

She never actually bothers to explain, not until after she’s led you into “Matt’s” apartment. It’s only then that she whispers in your ear that if you show him a good time, he’ll make your little money problem go away. You do it, he never gives you a chance to say no anyway.

She tells you that you did good while you smoke a cigarette outside. You’re never going to feel clean again. It’s a good thing she bought that ketamine. You spend the next twelve hours staring up at the car’s interior as she races down unknown highways at twenty over the limit.

“I think this is a good place for us to part ways.”

The festival is upbeat, relaxed, the music from the stage filters through the trees with the warm sun. You close your eyes, and feel as all the light and warmth drains away from the world. She loves you and wishes you the best.

She said she wanted to build a life with you, she never said that you would have a place in that life after it was built. She promised that it would all work out. She promised that it would be okay. She promised you the world. She never promised you anything.

Eight thousand miles zig-zagged across the country, in a festival surrounded by people, you find yourself completely and utterly alone. You wander the trails, eyes and mind lost somewhere a thousand miles back in Matt’s apartment. You have nowhere to go.

// dolls, body horror, abuse, implied gaslighting

The first time you felt the loose flutter in your gears, you ignored it. It was such a little thing, it was probably nothing. Not worth noting, not worth remembering. When did it begin? How long has it been now? How many times did you tell yourself it was nothing?

By the time you finally admit that something is amiss, you’re feeling it almost all the time, along with a deep seated wrongness inside your ceramic shell, like all of your axles are slightly out of alignment. You pray your Miss doesn’t notice the shudder in your motions.

At night, when you are meant to be resting and still, you shakily jerk open your chest panels and run delicate trembling fingers over winding clockworks, gently pressing on the gears to try and adjust their orientation. It works for a time, but the flutter always returns.

Over time, your movements begin to betray you, your joints behaving oddly, your expertly carved hands trembling as if failing to contain a great energy. Your patient investigations of your malfunction only reveal yet deeper misalignments. And then you feel the thread.

You aren’t sure it’s really there at first, it slips through your fingers, less real than an imagined hair stuck in your teeth. Are you just willing it not to be real? You finally manage to grip it and yank. You feel it slithering through your gears as you draw it out of you.

You manage to pull enough out to look at, in the glow of the bathroom nightlight. It’s matte and black, smooth like hair but impossible to break, and the more you draw it out, the more there is. You feel your gears straining as you start a pile on the floor before you.

The process is agonizing and slow, but once you begin, you can’t stop yourself. You just keep tugging and tugging and tugging, transfixed and horrified that something like that was inside you. There’s just so much of it. Why is there so much of it? Why won’t it stop?

Your Miss finds you hunched over a toilet filled with an improbable volume of black bile in the morning. The thread snakes out of you into a waist high pile beside the sink. Your porcelain feels strange and clammy to the touch, your vision swims, your center of balance listing.

The following days are a blur, your Miss cleans you up and puts you back to work. You would almost think that things were going to be okay, if not for the undercurrent of anger and resentment in her voice, and the growing pile of black thread in the bathroom corner.

How much can there really be inside one doll? How can so much stuff come pouring out of you and still leave a you behind? Do you feel less? Does it feel like your soul is leaking out a little with each drop of bile? What’s happening to you? Weren’t you a good doll?

Something inside you is shifting, there’s nothing in there which is supposed to do that. You just want to be a good doll. The more you puke up, the more there seems to be, as if you’ve cracked open a reservoir in your soul. Your Miss hits you. You deserved it.

You pull and rip at the thread, yanking it away bit by bit, trying hopelessly to appease your Miss’s exacting standards and falling further and further from them in the attempt. The threads curl around your gears, you feel like you’re drowning in your porcelain.

One day, you feel yourself jam. Your gears lock and freeze together, leaving you lying helpless in bed as your Miss yanks off the covers and dumps you onto the floor. You puke up more darkness, vision swimming as your Miss shouts and kicks your useless body.

The darkness is tugging on you, pulling at you like a puppet on strings now thoroughly tangled through your insides. You feel yourself drunkenly rising and before you’ve fully comprehended what you’ve done, your fist has connected with your Miss’s cheek and sent her sprawling.

She stares at you. You stare at her. For a moment, the ugly uncontrollable tension inside you abates, like an electric charge that found a ground. You feel sick, horrible, she starts to rise, face turning from shock to anger; every spring inside you tenses at once, and you flee.