Killer-Extras: Flash Fiction
James Dorr brings us a tale of grief, loss, and insanity; in miniature!
The Dollhouse Family
By James Dorr
She's dusting. The dollhouse. She does this on Saturdays, the day her life was destroyed. Several days afterward she found the dollhouse up in the attic -- a relic of childhood. It now brings her comfort. Her old Barbies also, a young man. A young woman. Mr. and Mrs. Dollhouse, she calls them. She talks to them sometimes.
Sometimes they answer back.
"Hello, Mr. Dollhouse," she says. "How are you? And where's Mrs. Dollhouse?"
She picks up Mr. Dollhouse to dust the dolls' living room, the doll-size couch Mr. Dollhouse was sitting on. She knows Mrs. Dollhouse is in the house somewhere. They never leave.
Unlike her own husband.
"You wouldn't leave Mrs. Dollhouse, would you?" she asks the one-time Ken. "Not like my" -- she breaks off, crying, putting the figure back down on its sofa. Her own husband's name was Ken. Sniffing, she goes on: "Not like my own husband, less than a year later. Telling me, 'Anna, life has to go on. You have to let go, Anna.' Like one could let go of that."
Something is missing, though. The football trophy on the doll mantel over the doll fireplace. Mr. Dollhouse had been a high school football hero. They'd never had children, the Dollhouses, that is. No pains. No joys. Only memories, like she has.
She's sure she had found the small trophy-shaped cup at a yard sale and put it in the dollhouse that dominates her own house's living room. With its own fireplace and its own mantel, its own couch and coffee table and chairs. Sometimes she has trouble separating the real house from the toy one.
But where is Mrs. Dollhouse?
She looks in the toy house's other rooms. There she is, in the kitchen! She smells smells of baking. She sees the doll-size bowls and spoons on the doll kitchen table.
"A birthday, Mrs. Dollhouse?" she asks.
It had been her son's birthday.
She cries again, but not as much this time. She has few tears left -- it's been so many years now. But her only son, dead.
And who would Mrs. Dollhouse be baking a cake for?
She's curious now. She gets up from the dollhouse with its cut-out walls and goes to the desk. The human-size desk. She opens its drawer and takes out the magnifying glass inside. The glass in her hand, she returns to the dollhouse.
Has Mrs. Dollhouse moved? Courteously, she seems to have backed away from the stove, leaving enough room for Anna to peer through the oven's glass window. A shape of some sort inside.
Excuse me, Mrs. Dollhouse," she says. She moves her face nearer, using the magnifying glass this time.
A cake of some sort inside. She peers more closely.
Shaped like -- a football!
Screaming, she bolts up. She runs to the mantel of her own fireplace, the human-size one, and grabs for the ivory box at its center. She wrests its lid open, memories crashing back to that Saturday seventeen years ago. The football-shaped cake she had bought for her son's birthday when they returned from the game that day. The state high school championship.
Her son had been the team's star place kicker.
But, two points behind, with seconds left in the game, the ball advanced to the nine yard line -- a distance her son had made so many times before -- this time he clutched.
He missed.
It wasn't his fault. The snap had been late. The ball wasn't held right. The holder had bobbled it.
So many things wrong.
Her son didn't answer when they explained this to him on the drive back home. He just went to his room when they got there.
"Let him work it out," her husband said. She had wanted to go up to comfort him.
Then, at dinner time, when she called upstairs, there was no answer.
Her husband went up, finally, and brought him down, the makeshift noose still around his neck. "The boy with the golden toe," they called him at school -- she grabbed the butcher knife out of the kitchen drawer, ripping his shoe off.
The toe that betrayed him!
Eyes filled with tears, she gazes in the box. One she kept jewelry in when she was younger. She looks at the tiny cushion, the desiccated toe in its center where she placed it after she cut it from her son's corpse.
The funeral. The memories. The preacher. The oration.
Now, the dollhouse.
Her husband was right. Seventeen years is more than enough. Enough for mourning. Enough for living.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Dollhouse," she says. She shoves the Barbie figure away as she opens the doll oven, pushing the toe in. She closes it.
She gets up to find a box of matches.
The stove doesn't work -- it's only a toy one -- so she lights fire to the dollhouse itself, laughing and screaming both as the flames crackle. "Sorry, Mr. Dollhouse," she says as the flames spread to immolate the miniature living room, melting the figure still lolled on its couch, then leap to the human-size chiffon drapes that hang behind the house.
Smoke and fire rise quickly, heat cracking the windows.
Catching Anna's clothes. Her hair. Skin blisters, her face blackens. Shrieking, she crumples to the flame-reddened rug, what's left of her tears boiling out from her eyes.
Then, in a last whisper, says: "Son, happy birthday."
Bio Bits:
James Dorr's new book, DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET, was published in December 2007 by Dark Regions Press as a companion to his earlier collection, STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE (2001). Indiana resident Dorr's cat, Wednesday, is a gray and black tabby who loved the toy hairball she got last Christmas, but still counts as her favorites her plastic fake spider collection.
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