7
The five stages of grief are bullshit.
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
Grief isn’t anything except what it is, and what it is is a storm. I don’t know how long I stayed caught in the violence of it. I don’t know how I can describe it other than to say it sucked me up, smashed me apart, and left me ruined.
Only after grief destroys you, only after you’ve released exactly how unsalvageable you are, how unending this storm will be, can you start to feel other things.
Those things don’t come in order, like in the textbook. It’s a bombardment of emotions, all of them muddied, messy, and overlapped. Panic and rage. Darkness and desperation. Numbness and pain. And, worst of all, confusion.
Why did Kyle do that to me?
Why couldn’t I stop him?
What’s going to happen now?
Those questions sliced into me, threaded through me, anchored me into my new body.
White porcelain limbs, plastic yellow ringlets, and layers upon layers of lace.
I felt myself sink into every stitch of that doll, merging with it in a way I knew immediately wouldn’t easily be undone.
But that didn’t matter to me. Not then. All that mattered were those three questions, echoing over and over again in my hollow porcelain head.
Why did Kyle do that to me?
Why couldn’t I stop him?
What’s going to happen now?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything except try to stay afloat, clinging to my new body, to the living world, to everything that made me me, everything Kyle tried to take when he crushed my trachea.
It took time. I can’t say how much, but slowly, in small, stolen moments, I became aware of the world again.
The smell of dust and rotting fabric.
The sound of crying, unnaturally deep and muffled through the walls.
The feel of my lace shifting in the air-conditioning.
Sight came last—hazy, and fish-eyed.
I tried to blink.
I couldn’t.
I tried to move.
I couldn’t do that either.
I choked through the choppy surge of fear and focused on the strange feel and shape of my new body.
My torso was a rectangular fabric sleeve, stuffed stiff, with a porcelain limb stitched onto each of the four corners.
Those limbs were cherub chubby, chalk white, and bent slightly at the joint.
My head was the strangest thing. It was heavy and too big for my soft fabric body, my chin resting on my chest.
And then there was the veil, a mat of webbed white lace, pressed up against my eyes.
Like a shroud.
The thought sent me spinning back into the darkness, the storm too big to weather, the emotions too fast to untangle, the reality too fucked up to face.
I was dead.
I’d been murdered.
And now I was in the body of a doll.
A. Fucking. Doll.
It was all so unfair.
The stupid way I’d been killed, the arsehole who’d done it, my dumb-as-shit decision to cling on to something, anything, rather than let myself slip away.
I could’ve been destined for a very respectable afterlife.
Heaven? Probably not. I didn’t think I’d done enough to deserve that.
But this? Limbo would’ve been better than this.
Or reincarnation. The great soul-recycling factory in the sky.
I think I would’ve done well as a single-celled organism, brainless, floating around in warm water all day.
People pay top dollar for that sort of thing.
Honestly, even the nothingness I’d always assumed was waiting for me after death would’ve been better than this.
I wanted to tear the lace from my face, scrape the rosy paint off my cheeks, and yank out my synthetic blonde curls. I wanted to smash my porcelain head against the bookshelf and scream until all my stuffing burst out.
But I couldn’t.
My head throbbed, my eyes burned, my chest ached, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t cry. I wanted to call out to my grandma, but my mouth was painted on, forever locked into a small, shy smile. The awfulness of that consumed me, and the darkness deepened.
But still those questions tugged at me, and, like the strings of a puppet, they pulled me back.
Why did Kyle do that to me?
Why couldn’t I stop him?
What’s going to happen now?
This time, when I saw the lace, I didn’t spiral.
I held on to the vision of it, picking apart every detail.
Floral, frayed, and thin enough that I could just make out the room beyond.
The haphazard stack of old birdcages, Grandma’s sewing machine, an abandoned project lying on the bedplate, and the threadbare green carpet.
I half expected to see myself on that carpet.
My body, lying where I left it.
But it was empty.
It was also day, sunlight streaming in to puddle on the floor, so bright it hurt to look at.
Time had passed. Perhaps a lot of time. Perhaps too much time.
Through the flowery white of my veil, I peered toward the clock hanging on the far wall.
It was a cheap plastic thing, which made no sense because there were a ton of much nicer clocks in the kitchen cupboard, some of which even worked.
Weirdly, the mundanity of that thought centered me.
I held on to it as the clockface limped into focus.
Five past midday. I watched it for a minute, then two. It stayed at five past midday.
Cheap clocks. Ugly and unreliable.
I tried to turn my head, to see more of the room, but I couldn’t. I could feel my stitches, my stuffing, and how it intersected with my porcelain, but I couldn’t manipulate anything. I was trapped, frozen, pinned down . . .
I beat back the choking froth of terror and kept looking. Everything kept swimming in and out of focus, the familiar four walls turned sinister and alien by the distortion of my glass eyes and the haze of lace.
I spotted a fly, fat and brown with black hair and red eyes. It hung in the air, wings frozen mid-beat.
My attention snapped back to the clock.
Five past midday.
It hadn’t stopped. Time had froz—
The second that thought entered my head, the clock’s hands started spinning, whirling around the face so fast they blurred. The fly vanished with a deep, angry buzz.
I tried to suck in a breath, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t breathe. I can’t breathe. It hurts. Terror shot through me. I tried to take another breath, this time to scream. The veil sucked up against my face, sharp, fast. I fell back into the darkness, choking on my impossible scream, on my panic.
For a while, the storm had me. Fear, rage, loss. Slowly, the pieces of me re-formed, fractured and fragile, but whole enough to peer back into the world of the living, back through lace-fogged eyes, back at that clock.
It was working, but not right. Its hands jerked forward, sometimes only a second, sometimes in leaps large enough to cut out hours.
The room went dark, then light, then dark again.
I realized it was the sun, rising and setting.
I watched, fighting down my horror as I tried to understand what I was seeing, why time would be moving so fast, and why it’d been holding still before.
Almost as if mocking me, the clock froze again, and I heard a sound, distorted and unnaturally deep. A moan of despair, echoing through the house, echoing from my grandma’s bedroom.
I spun out.
Fear.
Confusion.
Pain.
It was hard, in the violence of that, to rationalize. It was hard to even comprehend what I had seen. But somehow, I did.
Ghost Lore Fact #1: Time is fucked up when you’re dead.
Sometimes it was on pause and sometimes it was on fast-forward, but as far as I could tell, rewind wasn’t an option.
Which meant I was wasting time. If I wanted to do something, I couldn’t hang around, processing my feelings.
I didn’t know how much time I’d already lost. Probably a lot.
I needed to get back. I needed to take control of this situation.
I needed to see my house, to see my grandma, and to see Kyle Lawson being fed slowly into a combine harvester.
Yes. I needed that most of all.
No matter what else happened, Kyle Lawson needed to pay.
That thought unfurled inside me, cold and powerful.
I clawed my way back out of the darkness, out of the storm, out of the violence of grief to stare at that clock.
It waved, arms swinging around in a janky sort of rumba, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and sometimes catching on a moment, giving me a static picture of the room before whirling relentlessly onward.
I saw Grandma come and leave, a blur of familiar colors.
I smelled burned food. Grandma never burned food.
I heard Cookie barking, deep, panicked, echoing barks.
He was still barking.
I tried to zero in on these moments, but they slipped away, lost in the riptide of time.
Worse were the pauses. The single seconds that felt like hours, days. The clock caught between ticks. The smoke detector’s low-battery beep stretched out into a scream like train brakes, metal on metal.
It was too much. How was I meant to talk to my grandma?
How was I meant to stop Kyle? How was I meant to fix this?
I wanted help. I wanted a goddamn tutorial.
Press X to jump. Hold L2 to crouch. But more than anything else, I wanted to dial the difficulty level down, to veto this mechanic, for everything to just go back to normal.
But it didn’t.
I’m not sure how long I stayed there, a witness, no better than a glitchy old security camera, half blind and more than half broken. It could’ve been weeks. Months. It might’ve turned into years if it wasn’t for the moth.
It was night and time was holding relatively stable when the moth crawled under my veil, fuzzy gray legs tangling in the lace, faceted black eyes staring.
I watched it, unable to do anything else, as it maneuvered over my skirt, into my lap, and up onto my face.
Its brown-gray abdomen blotted out my sight, small sharp feet scraping at my nose, at my mouth, at my eye.
It probed at the stitching in my shoulder, at the fabric beneath.