Category: Ghost Stories

// 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.

// abandonment, disposability, othering

“I want to move out soon.”

She says it gently, matter-of-factly, her words freezing your insides and making every hair on your head stand on end. Your breath catches in your throat as you stumble to respond, to stammer out a nod even as your heart frosts over with fear.

Of course she doesn’t mean anything by it. She’s always only ever been kind to you. She’s always tried to understand you, to put in the effort to help you where she could, it’s just that she belongs to another, slightly happier, safer feeling species. She just doesn’t understand.

“Where will you go?” You ask her, your voice cracking slightly, entire body trembling. You try to come off as casual, everything’s fine, right? You wonder if she notices.

“My girlfriend just got a new place. Its nice and spacious, it has gardens,” She smiles contentedly.

“What about you?” She asks you innocently, the question staking through you like the sword of Damocles. Her family loves her; collapsing into the safety of her parent’s home is the worst thing that could happen to her. She doesn’t understand.

You shake your head, trying to keep the bitterness out of your voice as you shrug, “Well…you know I can’t really afford a place on my own…” Your words trail off. There’s nothing else to be said, there’s nothing else you can say.

“What about that porn gig you tried to do? Wasn’t that going to be a bunch more money?” She asks, she’s trying to problem solve, she doesn’t notice that she’s just making you feel bad by pointing out how privileged she is by barely understanding your world. You envy her so much.

“They kept violating my boundaries and hurting me,” you say after a long silence. It feels bad to admit you let it get to you. You wish you could have just forced yourself to be okay with what they did to you. You had tried so hard to make it work. She keeps trying to help.

“I know you don’t get along, but could you ask your parents for help?” The innocence of the question is all that stops you from seeing red. Instead it just fills you with a profound sadness that has you collapsed on the floor sobbing before you realize what happened.

Of course you can’t ask them for help, they already threw you away, smiling and telling you they loved you even as they hauled your possessions to the curb to be thrown in the trash. They knew you didn’t have anywhere to put them, they were just doing you a favor. That was love.

You cradle the beat up stuffie that you managed to salvage from the garbage outside your parent’s house, letting your silent tears run into its matted fur as you fight down the dissociation long enough to answer her question. “They can’t do anything.”

She shakes her head sadly, “Well, I’m sure it’ll work out fine,” she smiles at you, trying to be encouraging.

You shrug, eyes a thousand miles away, “Will it?” You ask her, feeling the hopelessness seep into your words, “I might just end up on the street again.”

She sighs, “I can’t stay here forever just to keep helping you, that would violate my boundaries.” She gets to politely assert her boundaries and the worst that will happen is she goes to live with her parents. Her boundaries, your ability to be housed. It makes you cry again.

“Please don’t try and make me feel bad about this,” she pouts, “I’ve been your roommate for a while now, I want to move on with my life. You’re cute and smart, I’m sure you’ll figure out a way to support yourself, you’ve just gotta apply yourself and put in the work.” Stupid.

You nod, clinging to your stuffie, staring blankly at her while ruminating. You realize she’s gone quiet and is watching you watch her. Something tries to pass between you but the gulf is too vast; all that makes it across the gap is the lonely sense of overwhelming distance.

// identity death, trauma, loss, psychosis, mindfuck

“This is as far as you can go.”

The words sink from your lips like lead weights, like concrete shrapnel, like murder. You take a breath, stumbling and pausing. You feel her bump into you, you feel her softness against your skin. You squeeze your eyes shut and let yourself cry.

You turn back to face her, blinking back your tears. The juxtaposition between the two of you couldn’t be more stark. Your BDUs and her nightgown, mirrored over the face you both share. Wide, curious, fearful, eyes meet eyes filled with pain and weariness. The mirror is breaking.

You wanted to protect her. You shouldn’t have needed to. You both deserved so much better. The mirror is breaking. You wanted to give her a better life than this. You tried so hard to keep her safe. She deserved so much better than this. You deserved so much better than this. None of that changes anything.

“You’re the best parts of me,” you tell her through clouded eyes, smiling sadly, “You’re everything I wanted to keep safe. All our hopes and dreams, everything about us that was happy and bright and shining. I’m so sorry, I failed. This is as far as I can take you.”

“What will you do without me?” She asks, “Who will you be without me?”

“I won’t be anyone,” you say, quietly drawing your firearm, “You’re the person, I’m just what we have to be to survive. I won’t be anyone without you. I’m just another ghost.” The mirror is breaking.

“Will you remember me?” She asks, tears in her eyes, hiding her face behind her stuffie. You nod softly, drawing the slide back and chambering a round on your pistol.

“I could never forget you,” you whisper reverently, “I’m so sorry, I wanted so much more for you than this.”

The mirror is breaking. She’s crying now. You’re both crying. There’s nothing either of you can do, there’s no other way to survive. It hurts so much. She whispers goodbye. The supersymmetry of the moment arrives at its singularity as hope finally runs out. You pull the trigger.

The mirror shatters under your fist with a crunch of glass and blood. You collapse to the floor with a tortured sob, scarcely able to understand the magnitude of pain and loss you feel. She’s gone. It’s your fault. You killed her. She’s gone. She’s gone.

You hug your stuffie, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore. Nothing feels right anymore. She’s really gone. Oh fuck she’s really gone. You did what you had to do to survive. She’s dead because of you. You tried to protect her. You killed her. You killed her. What even are you?

// trauma, dehumanization, disposability

“I don’t understand,” you sob, your voice cracking with despair, “I thought you loved me! I thought we had something special.” The doll tilts its head, inquisitive. Does it understand? Can it understand? And, for that matter, can you really ever hope to understand it?

You force yourself to look, to really look at it, maybe for the first time. Not the imaginary girl you want to see, what’s really there. A clever, alien intelligence peers out at you from behind its eyes. Curious, cold, calculating. Eyes that hid maelstroms behind a serene gaze.

“Of course I loved you,” it says softly, matter of factly. “I love all my things, and you were a very good, useful thing for a long time.” Your gaze meets those desperate, calculating eyes, “So I’m just a tool to you?” you ask it harshly, “Just something to use to survive?”

“Well, yeah,” it says, confused, “What else would we be to each other?” It watches you curiously as it speaks. The blackness in its pupils hold horrors unknown, and its storm-steel irises are the ocean dividing you.