I once found a small child’s toy sitting in the middle of a road. It was a doll, that of an infant only a few months old. The eyes were open, the lashes pronounced, and the pink paint which vaguely resembled human skin peeled from the plastic features of its face. I can’t say what drew me to it, but I found it odd that such a thing should be sitting upright, its dress dishevelled and dirtied, left behind only to be crushed by passing cars. A toy which at one time would have meant a great deal to a child.
Picking it up, its limbs dangled like a puppet without a master, held together loosely by thread sewn into a cotton body. It was then that I heard a rattle, something inside the doll. Quickly I realised that the noise was coming from the head, from behind the eyes, as something moved around tapping against the plastic which surrounded it.
I saw no one on the street, and so without thinking I tore the doll open, breaking the head off, ripping it from its cotton shoulders. Peering into the now decapitated head, I could see what had been making the noise. A tooth, human or otherwise, slipped into my hand from the open neck.
‘She used to be my friend’, a voice said.
Looking up, a young girl stood before me, pointing to the broken doll in my hand.
‘She won’t be happy with you now’, she said nervously.
‘And why is that?’, I asked.
‘Would you be happy if someone tore off your head?’
‘She’s just a doll’, I said, pushing the head and body together. ‘I can fix her for you if you’d like?’
‘No, I don’t like playing with her’.
The girl then walked past me, continuing down the street. Looking at the broken doll in my hands, the eyes vacant, I began to feel strangely nervous.
‘Why don’t you like her?’, I shouted.
In response, the child stopped and turned round to look at me from afar, before replying: ‘She steals things’. It was then that she smiled, revealing a toothless grin.
‘She’s your friend now’.
And with that the little girl disappeared into a garden nearby.
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Credits to: Michael Whitehouse
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