CW: None.
No one knows where the doll came from. With its blue glass eyes and ribboned hair, it looks like the ones you see at department stores and wonder who the hell buys them.
“It’s gonna kill us in our sleep,” Kathy says, slapping Yuki’s hand away when he tries to play with the doll’s horsetail hair.
I cringe as Yuki crams the remaining pizza into his mouth like someone stuffing a turkey. The truth is: there’s something about people who take big bites that makes me nervous. Like, what’s their rush? Don’t they want to savor the taste, those chewy carbs? My mom said I think about things too much. Like whether or not the raccoons are killing each other at night in our yard. Or: Do I wash my vegetables enough? The Chinese medicine sites say I’ve consumed too much excess metal, my body a broken mix of cold and hot, dark and light. I tell my mom: If I don’t think about these things, I start thinking about dying.
“Hey, did it just move?” Kathy picks up the pizza cutter still on the table like we’re in a slasher movie instead of her grandmother’s old summer house.
“You’re thinking about it too much,” Yuki says, putting an arm around her shoulder.
During elementary school, Kathy and I watched Friday the 13th on her dad’s iPad while her parents were downstairs, and she couldn’t sleep for days, imagining a serial killer knocking on her ninth floor apartment window.
If you fall asleep, it’ll come for you first, she said, slapping me awake.
“Maybe it’s a ghost,” Kathy says. “Looking for a new body to possess.”
“Couldn’t they just go to a morgue?” Yuki says. “There’re plenty of bodies just waiting to be picked up. Two-for-one deals galore.”
I want to tell them: bodies are ugly, unreliable things. Vomit-shades of pink or brown, smooth or dried out, freckled and cigarette burnt and cut with imperfections like the too-shimmery “FINAL SALE” outfits in the dingy backroom at JAS Lucky Mart on Roosevelt Avenue where my aunt buys all her clothes. The same aunt married some guy from the factory where she ironed shirts who then left her after his green card came through. “He still had a wife and a kid back in Beijing, can you believe it?” my mom whispered, closing the door so the secrets wouldn’t leak into the hall.
I think about gray bodies sometimes too. Old tuna gray, the kind of color no one likes looking at. I saw it once: My uncle on the tiled bathroom floor in his old house, water spilling out of the sink, his lungs wheezing air like a broken plastic fan. I stood there, staring at him for at least five minutes until my mother came into the bathroom, screaming. “Go play outside, now,” she ordered, as if she could wipe the image from my memory with the sheer heat of the afternoon sun.
My aunt paid someone to paint over that gray body until my uncle was as glossy tan as a doll straight out of a department store box. A few days later, we gathered in a clammy room in a Flushing funeral home, folded colored paper into ingots, and gave a stranger a red envelope of cash to chant sutras so that gray body would not return as a vengeful ghost.
My uncle once said dolls can house the souls of the dead, but he also said aliens were monitoring us through street pigeons, so I don’t say anything. I think of the dolls in the display windows at Macy’s during Christmas, the ones I used to stare at growing up, hands pressed to the glass. I’d always wondered what it was like to be one of them, wrapped in princess dresses or the occasional doctor or astronaut costume, in my certified castle of Shiseido makeup counters and 100% Egyptian cotton bedsheets. What was it like to be a doll, to be beautiful and at the full mercy of strangers? Those dolls my neighbor’s older brother used to strip naked and tear the heads off. Those dolls heaped onto a garbage ferry a few months after Christmas, floating across the Hudson River. What were they all thinking about? Was something trapped inside them as they burnt in recycling incinerators? Or am I just thinking too much again?
Yuki kisses Kathy with an open mouth. I look away, even though I know he likes when I watch. I think of how when we were younger, Kathy once taped my mouth shut while I was sleeping. I read somewhere that it helps you get a better night’s sleep, she grinned, standing over me when I woke up trying to gasp for breath.
“Are you afraid of dying?” The doll tilts its porcelain head up at me from the chair.
The ground shudders. Cracks spider up the walls all around us, the shape of snowflakes.
“Fuck, is it an earthquake?” Yuki asks.
“It’s not so bad, being free of a flesh body,” the doll says, clinging to my chest.
“Did you say something?” Kathy asks, turning the pizza cutter to me. “Why the hell did you pick up the doll?”
The tremors intensify. The TV crashes face-first in the living room. Kathy jumps at the sound of the glass screen shattering.
“Play with me,” the doll coos.
Growing up, Kathy’s grandmother used to give us both dolls for our birthdays, small porcelain ones donning pretty lace dresses, their skin cold and chalky. Girls nowadays don’t play enough with dolls, she’d say. I used to like lining them up by the window so they could look outside at the nice weather and the leaves changing colors, but Kathy would hide hers in the basement until the year-end when her father gathered all their old clothes to donate to the Salvation Army and she’d stuff them in between corduroy jackets and too-small satin tank tops. Even when the old woman was lying half-way between life and death in an overcrowded hospital bed, she’d remind us about her dolls.
“Are you taking good care of them?” she’d ask, the hospital monitor beeping beside her, the IV poking through her paper-thin skin. “They’ll take good care of you if you do the same.”
The old tatami mats rip open under Yuki and he disappears like a magic trick. Kathy screams. The sink and fridge go next, dropping into the open mouth where the floor had once been. Take-out napkins fly out like parachutes opening. I grab hold of the lone remaining light fixture, swinging precariously on the electric wire, the doll pressed to my chest. The walls collapse, the ground splitting down to the concrete, to the dark soil, sinking farther and farther until there’s a gaping hole so deep I can’t see the bottom.
Was there always a hole this deep under this house?
Kathy grips the edge of a block of concrete, her body dangling over the hole. It’s just the two of us now, Yuki no more than a pile of lusty bones at the bottom of the hole.
I think of how when we were younger, we’d play with dolls, just the two of us then too, dressing them up, building them little houses out of Legos or shoe boxes. Sometimes she’d twist their legs or arms to see how far they’d go, throwing them into the walls after a fight with her parents. I’d pick them up afterwards, silently apologizing as their painted eyes stared up at me. A plastic body was a more reliable thing—hollow, durable, made to withstand abuse.
“Don’t they kind of creep you out?” Kathy asked at the start of middle school when she saw the shelf of dolls still in my room. “Everyone already thinks you’re a weirdo. When are you going to grow up?”
I swing over and reach out. Kathy grabs a hold of my clammy hand, the one she always complained about during school trips. The concrete breaks free underneath her, but it’s okay, I’m just in time. I hold on to her tightly, the way good friends do while screaming through a haunted house together, both thankful and terrified to still be alive. With Kathy, I always feel like I’m running in that space between life and death.
The doll digs its little hands into my chest and throat. It hurts, but I don’t mind. I know what it’s like to just want to feel safe. To feel loved.
“The problem with dolls,” Kathy once said. “Is that they always look like they’re hiding something.
And maybe she’s right.
I watch Kathy’s legs twist and lengthen into fat roots. The woody flesh shoots out, sinking into the sides of the hole, spreading itself deep into the earth. Branches burst from her skull and torso, striated bone and phloem. Her fingers flutter out into a kaleidoscope of butterflies, flapping against the twilight sun pouring in through the broken window. She opens her mouth, but her screams zip into silence as her tongue and lips blossom into spears of chrysanthemums and peonies.
It’s so beautiful, I can’t think of anything else.
One summer when I was still living in Japan, a classmate invited me and a few friends to his grandmother’s summer house in the countryside to watch the fireworks display the area was famous for. We spent the day at the beach, ate fresh seafood, took lots of photos of flooded rice paddies, and when we finally got to the friend’s house that night, he told us: “My grandmother’s living in a nursing home now, so I haven’t been here in years.” It was a pretty old house with a few tatami rooms and sliding doors, a washiki squat toilet that looked haunted, and there on a retro floral-print couch was a porcelain doll, just sitting there. And the first thing my friend says is, “I’ve never seen that doll before.”
Anyways, I haven’t seen that friend in over a decade, I hope he’s doing well.
