Fifth: Baby Laugh-a-Lot
After the ultrasound reveals another girl, her mother decides to shop for dolls only on vintage sites to help make her feel special. “There will be more stress with a second child,” she says, “but this one is good-natured and easy to love.” As if it has been listening, the baby laughs as soon as the girl picks it up. Soon, she learns to hold it carefully. Almost any movement makes her laugh. Like it’s a sickness. She is afraid to tell her mother that this baby will grow up to be evil, that it sounds cruel, awful enough to be recalled from stores.
Sixth: Her Reborn Baby Doll
Her once-promised sister, it wasn’t, but her mother selected the model featuring the optional beating heart and carried the gift-wrapped baby home bundled in a blanket as if sleet had begun to slant from a terrible sky. “What will you name her?” her mother said.
“Bernadine,” the girl whispered, knowing not to say Darla, as she felt the doll’s heart pulse against her body. As soon as she kissed its face, she packed away her other dolls like winter clothes. But one morning, only four months later, when she pressed her ear on Bernadine’s small chest, she heard silence. Her mother said, “Even these babies have a spring that can stick.” The girl placed her fingers upon Bernadine’s wrist, listening to its small, demanding quiet. She didn’t cry until her mother left the room.
Seventh: Chatty Cathy
First, perfectly timed, Cathy said, “Now you have a friend.” For a week, the girl loved pulling Cathy’s string to hear “I love you.” When her new school was lonely and scary, Cathy, as if she knew, told her, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Sometimes, though, the girl had to tug the string ten times to hear Cathy tell her what she needed to hear. Sometimes more. One evening she wouldn’t say, “I love you.” Instead, four times in a row, she said, “Take me with you.” The girl pulled harder, but Cathy kept whining. She pulled so hard that Cathy, at last, wouldn’t talk. Like she wasn’t her friend after all.
Eighth: Wedding Day Midge
“Barbie’s friend, Midge Hadley, is getting married,” her mother said. The girl marched Midge down an aisle she made of a wide white ribbon. All of her old dolls, unpacked, sat on either side and stared as if they were jealous. None of them had ever had a special day. The girl didn’t have any boy dolls, but she could imagine who would marry Midge, a boy who was taller and had the same smile, a boy who stood as straight as Midge with hair so much the same texture that he looked as if he might be her brother.
Ninth: Happy Family Midge
Happy Family Midge had such a fat belly that the girl barely recognized her. “Midge has been married a while,” her mother said. “She’s in the family way.”
The girl said nothing. She stared at Midge’s swollen plastic belly until her mother tapped it and said, “Pull.” When the girl tugged, the belly lifted off in her hand and she found a baby curled in Midge’s plastic womb. “Now you can dress her,” her mother said. “See, there are things for your new sweetheart to wear.”
As the girl unwrapped those tiny clothes, her mother handed her a second box. “Now there’s a husband who won’t leave,” she said. “Now, no matter what. There will be two children because there’s an older brother named Ryan.”
Tenth: Her Breast-Feeding Doll...
The package had one, large-print sentence: “Because you shouldn’t have to wait until you have breasts before you start breast-feeding.” After the girl read it twice, she asked her mother to leave. “Of course,” her mother said, and the girl cuddled her child to her skinny chest. At last, she lifted the flowered bra from the box and strapped it on. Two of those flowers would welcome that baby to suck, its mouth fitted perfectly as a lesson. She waited to sense her child’s hunger. There were fierce secrets that mothers knew. Lips and hands will want you. Tongues and teeth. She pressed her baby to a flower.
Eleventh: Her Look-Alike Doll
Because her mother had selected a photo from an album of her oldest photos to form the new doll’s pliant face, the girl recognized her infant self. For the rest of the day, she gazed at that familiar baby, its small, resilient body. That night, as she slept with herself, she dreamt of shrinking. The following morning, she asked to be photographed, and among those faces on her mother’s phone, she looked for the one that would always best fit the body she had woken terrified to lose. That afternoon, her mother downstairs, she crawled inside the closet where everything of hers too small to wear was stored. She whimpered with her nearly forgotten voice, stuffed two fingers into her mouth, and sucked on those warm toys to keep from screaming.
latest flash collection is The History of the Baker’s Dozen (Pelekinesis, 2024). His long-form story collections have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
