10
I wasn’t entirely certain how I ended up at the tip, but I was pretty sure Auntie Dawn had something to do with it.
After all, throwing stuff out, even broken stuff, wasn’t exactly Grandma’s style.
But, with time charging by as fast as it was, and with me being several clicks beyond “messed up” and safely in the realm of “catastrophically fucked,” I couldn’t be sure.
All I knew was, I’d been lying on the living room floor, day and night flickering by, sounds of shouting and crying and barking smashing together, hellish and high-pitched.
Then, in a blink, all was quiet, I was in a shoebox, and a guy with razor burn was staring down at me with wide eyes.
“Holy shit. Dude. Check this out. It’s like . . . a broken doll or something.”
“Do you think it’s worth anything?”
“I mean . . . maybe? Look at it, though. It’s gnarly. All gross and smashed up. Also, this box was duct-taped closed, had ‘Do not open’ written on it, and is half filled with Bible pages?”
“Hmm. Probably fine. Put it over there. Paul might take it.”
Paul—a middle-aged man in a bright-red shirt—did take me, along with a stack of old furniture, several boxes of yellow-paged books, and eight trash bags full of toys.
The logo on his shirt said Trash N’ Treasure.
I wondered what he’d been drinking to think there was any hope of me graduating from the former to the latter.
Whatever it was, it must’ve been strong, because when we arrived at the titular Trash N’ Treasure—a thrift shop I vaguely remembered driving by on the edge of town—he arranged me and all my broken pieces in the locked glass cabinet by the cash register.
A puzzle, waiting to be put together was written on the sign sticky-taped to the window.
An optimistic bit of marketing on Paul’s part.
If it’d been me, I probably would’ve just written Broken old junk.
Or, more likely, never even attempted to sell a smashed-up old doll to begin with.
Despite the aura of a locked glass cabinet, I was pretty damn sure I wasn’t worth much.
Yes, I looked old-timey, and perhaps parts of me were, but other parts had a distinctly mass-produced vibe.
And deep down (or perhaps not that deep down) he must’ve known it, because the price written on the sticky-taped piece of paper was $19. 95.
Trash N’ Treasure was exactly what you’d expect.
Rows of old furniture, racks of clothes, and shelves of miscellaneous items. I watched customers blur, then creep, then blur as they moved through the store.
The lights turning on, then off, then on again.
The most popular item was pants, go figure.
There were always at least two people at that rack, flicking through jeans.
I had a good vantage point from where I sat.
Even with my cracked eye, I could tell that low-rises were back.
I moved, of course.
That was the only power I had, and I wasn’t going to give it up.
Moving also allowed me to take stock, fill out a mental damage report.
I’d lost an arm at some point. My other one was hanging by a thread, literally.
Both my legs had been reduced to shattered stumps, my body was floppy from lack of stuffing, and my head .
. . I wasn’t sure how much of that I had left.
Not a lot, if I had to guess. I couldn’t feel the prickle of my synthetic hair anymore, and I was pretty sure my one remaining eye was cracked through the middle.
The only part of my face left undamaged was my lips, still trapped in that small, shy smile.
The thought made me want to bash my face into the ground, to reduce that smile to pieces and then grind those pieces to dust.
Instead, I used my one arm, snapped off at the wrist, to drag myself around the shelf, pressing up against the glass some days, lying in the corner on others.
Eventually, someone must have noticed, because my sign changed.
A puzzle, waiting to be put together A spooky haunted doll $19.95 $12.50
Weirdly, that seemed to work. More faces pressed up against my window, anyway.
Some curious, some scoffing, some with a strange, wide-eyed sort of intensity.
I listened to a couple of kids debate whether or not they should buy me for an upcoming Halloween party.
In the end, they went with a bingo ball cage filled with numbered Ping-Pong balls instead.
I couldn’t really blame them.
After all, when it came to playing the part of the possessed toy, I wasn’t doing a very good job.
I didn’t jump up and dance, shout obscenities, or do any of the other things you’d expect from a knockoff Chucky.
Most of the time, I just lay there, watching the world through the glass doors of the cabinet like it was a TV screen and all the people in the shop were the characters in some long, boring soap opera.
The employees all thought Paul was an arsehole (they were right).
Paul thought all the employees were talking behind his back (he was right).
The customers were always right (they weren’t).
The shop wouldn’t make enough money to pay rent if they didn’t sell this sofa today (I was pretty sure that whole thing was just a lie Paul made up to try and motivate the workforce, because they didn’t sell the sofa, and it was fine).
I watched, somehow both exhausted and bored, every part of me wrung out and thin, my rage frothy, weak, and wasting.
I felt broken. I felt small. I felt . . . to blame. All of this was my fault. I should’ve known Auntie Dawn would’ve been there. I should’ve known she would freak out if she saw me move. I should’ve stopped Kyle Lawson from killing me.
Kyle wasn’t a big guy. He was closer to Andrew Garfield than to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A little bit of muscle, but not enough to so quickly and easily end my life.
I should’ve been able to stop him. I should’ve fought back harder.
I should’ve at least blackened an eye, bloodied a lip, broken a nose, something.
But I hadn’t.
And now I was in pieces, locked in a glass case, still smiling my pleasant smile.
But what else could you really expect from an adequately competent business administrator?
“Why won’t Paul let us dump that creepy old thing?” I overheard an employee say one day.
“He reckons a collector will want it.”
“What sort of collector?”
A puzzle, waiting to be put together A spooky haunted doll A broken toy $19.95 $12.50 $9.00
I’d barely done anything to Kyle, which was why I was here.
Trapped in this useless doll body, time roller-coastering around me, my grandma’s grief-stricken face seared into my mind.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d looked when she picked me up.
Cheeks hollow, eyes shadowed, skin papery and pale.
She hadn’t been eating. She didn’t look like she’d done much sleeping either, all because I couldn’t stop him.
Why did Kyle do that to me?
Why couldn’t I stop him?
What’s going to happen now?
“Stop it,” a tiny voice whispered.
There was a woman kneeling near my cabinet, pulling ceramic cats out of a box and arranging them around a sign. Take home a feline friend (that won’t puke up a hairball on the rug). $3.50 each. 2 for $6! Get the whole family for $14.95!
She had a lopsided mullet, brown and shaved at the sides, a sleeve of mismatched tattoos, and a blocky old hearing aid hooked up to her left ear.
The aesthetic ugly enough that it looped all the way back around into being hot.
The rest of her outfit stayed stuck in ugly.
An oversize staff T-shirt, blue jeans, and shoes that had been taped back together.
Her hands were shaking as she set the cats on the shelf.
“Stop it,” the woman said again, a low hiss. “Stop thinking about him.”
She was talking to herself . . . about a guy. This had the potential to be the most interesting storyline on this weird reality program yet. I wondered if it was a friend she liked but couldn’t have, or a boyfriend she didn’t like but couldn’t get rid of.
“Fuck you,” she spat. “He’s not my boyfriend. He’s not a friend. He’s not anything to me.”
Wait.
Wait a second.
Wait a whole goddamned minute.
Can you hear me? I thought as loudly and clearly as I could.
She winced and touched her hearing aid.
Holy shit. You can. You can hear me.
She didn’t respond.
Fuck. No. I’m sorry. I’m freaking out. Please don’t freak out.
It’s me. I mean, the doll. I’m the doll.
I mean, no, I’m not the doll. I died and got stuck in the doll.
It . . . it doesn’t matter. Please, you have to help me.
No one else can hear me. I don’t know how long I’ve been trapped like this.
“I’m trying to work,” she muttered, and put the last cat on the shelf. “I can’t do this right now.”
Do what?
“Have a mental breakdown.”
Wait, I thought/said. No. I’m real. Please. You have to believe me. I’m real. I can move! Just look at me, I’ll show you. Please.
She didn’t look at me. She turned and walked away, shoulders stiff, clutching the box the cats had come out of with white-knuckled fists.
I called after her, and when she didn’t react, I screamed after her. I couldn’t do anything else. She was the first person I’d been able to communicate with since this whole ordeal began. I couldn’t let her just slip away. I needed her more than I’d ever needed a person before.
Someone I could talk to.
A psychic.
I’d never believed in psychics before. I’d never believed in ghosts before either.
Briefly, madly, I wondered what existed out there in the world.
Vampires? Werewolves? Fish-headed aliens like in Call of Cthulhu?
It was obvious that the world was a bigger, messier, uglier place than I’d thought it was when I was a kid.
A place with magic and monsters . . . like Kyle.
The woman crushed the box in her hands as she left the room.
She could hear me.
I knew she could.
And so began my campaign.
Look at me, I begged whenever she passed by my cabinet. Please.