Doll

by Sarah Deng, 27'

Artwork by Yilin Chen, Westview High School, 27'

I don’t know if she’ll come back. 

I don’t know if I just imagined everything we went through.

No, the marker makeup stains on my face are still there, and my dress is still ripped from where she tried to make me a new outfit.

I don’t know what she wants me to do.

I’ve been obedient and done everything she’s asked of me.

She’d wrenched my head off before and had to ask her mommy to fix me

It’s still loose in places

But I still love her with all my heart because I should, right?

I wonder where the days I made her laugh went.

I wonder what happened to the times in which I was her best friend.

But laying here in my plastic house with my ripped dress and mutilated face, I remember:

I’m just a doll.

The ivory walls, antique window frames, engraved wooden doors, a pristine yard, and bursting blooms completed the illusion he worked so hard to weave. He always put on an intricate game of pretend displayed ostentatiously for the others, especially for our neighbors. He would ask me to bake fresh scones for them, only to starve me a few days later. He pushed me to host massive dinner parties in the same yard I broke my back to keep while forbidding me any social interaction beyond that. He waved away praises about his immaculate home only to savagely whisper threats into my ear once they were out of earshot. He would purchase expensive clothes for me to wear outside, only to undress me and keep me vulnerable as soon as we went inside. It was his house, and I was his doll.

Yet no one saw behind engraved wooden doors or heard the muted hysterical sobs that didn’t match the flawless exterior. No one could see under the polished floorboards or smell the undertone of lingering substance floating right over the embroidered carpet. If my rigorously trained smile faltered just a crack, or if my accent slipped just a little, I was sent into the deepest corners of myself and woke up hurting in places nobody could see. Maybe if someone heard the screams behind those ivory walls, they’d know something was wrong. But the perfect dollhouse facade held, and teary cries fell upon deaf ears.

Sometimes, I tried to remember the times before I was given to him. But all I remembered was the plastered smile on my face, acting as the only dam from the river of my tears as they traded my entire life for a cow and sack of lopsided coins. And then I was shipped across the ocean. Beyond that was the memory of cold, plasticky hands as they handled me and their blank stares as they shouted at me to stop sniveling. I wished I could fly away, free, like the doves painted in his office. But there was no hope because button eyes could not see, plastic fingers could not feel, and cotton-stuffed heads could not hear past exquisite lies.