WintergreenYou tilt the doll's chin up. Its charmglass eyes go wide, just enough to see through them, a window to the forest growing inside yet far away. The trees are tall now, light dim beneath their canopies. Not long now until you'll crack this doll and go through.
the missing antimatter bomb blinks at her feet.
"consider the phoenix. it dies in flames and rises from ash. but there are no endless cycles. it cannot be its own sacrifice."
she lets her dress slip to the floor. her shoulders are inlaid with red and gold wings.
DavidThe fire is banked and crackling. Its light outlines two figures, glasses in hand, in the final throes of
companionable conversation, when both parties drift into longer and longer silences.
When a newborn doll asks, inevitably, "what kind of person was I?" It's important to tell the right kind of lie. If it is to be shaped for domestic service, tell it it was a good person who fell on hard times or a child who was sold by destitute parents.
The witch's needle slides in, deeper than anything has ever gone. Deeper than anything was ever meant to go. It feels good, then bad, then good again, like losing a baby tooth but in reverse, somehow.
People and dolls break differently. The latter a quiet, priceless sound followed by "sorry, miss," the former, a nauseating, wet-sounding crack with an instant screaming response.
"You see," she said to the third figure across the table, "how it is. Three years ago, I think, give or take, and yet. So save both of us a little trouble, darling, and understand that I own you too, right down to the bone. And I don't need the meat." □
#EmptyOctober: bone
"Everyone hates me, I hate everyone! Everybody hates me, I eat everybody!"
-marching chant among the Rotten Dolls of the Bilious Witch
#EmptyOctober #2.
The birth of a doll, traditionally, is reckoned from the last moment it has blood within its veins. There are many further steps and rituals before the process is successful but that is when the change is irreversible.