Sample Sunday Preview: The Dolls in the Window
This story is a preview from my upcoming collection of flash fiction, Night Residue.
She lived across the street from the shop on the corner for many years, since childhood, in fact. And, during that time, the shop on the corner stood quite still and quite empty. The possibility, the threat, of some strange internal movement was always upon it though, seeming to emanate from behind the windows patched with broken boards and the wasted white of its painted brick walls. The dolls could be seen through the window on the first floor – there was a second window, but it had long ago been destroyed by a vandal-flung stone and was now covered by rotten patches of tarpaulin.
The dolls always drew her eye; she always found them, whenever she was gazing out of her bedroom window from across the street at the shop on the corner.
The dolls, they were unquiet things – mannequins with weathered faces hanging loose and askew, displaying a profound decay that was not of the flesh but that gnawed away from some dark, inside place. They were pale, they were lank, and she could see the ugliness underneath where the plastic, wood, fibreglass or whatever it was they were made from had collapsed in on itself. If the light was right, it seemed to glisten, the stuff inside them, glisten and appear to breathe.
That was when she always looked away.
The shop on the corner had stood alone and uninhabited for longer than her mother could remember, perhaps since her childhood in fact. No-one she asked could remember the owner but they could remember that he was there, at some point. The words that once made up the proprietor’s name were little more than smudges and smears on the old wood over the shop-front. There was nothing left of the shop, what it once was, what it once had been, except for the dolls in the window with their quiet painted eyes, and their strangely glistening soft insides.
She grew up as all people do, and life went on with its dismays and disappointments through the years. The shop on the corner remained, always the same, always there as she began dating boys who thought they were men, and then men who behaved like little boys. She grew up and she grew tired, and, one day, her mother died and left her the house in her Will. Having lived through restless years in houses and apartments shared with friends and boyfriends (never fiancés), she moved back home. For want of a better term, she settled down. She was alone between the walls papered over with childhood memories, and carpeted by the trodden-in dust and dirt of the not-so-distant past. There was comfort there, cold but true, and she embraced it, never wanting to let it go.
Through the window of her bedroom at night, she could see across the street, those languorous shapes, like restless dreams, stirring though completely still in the shadows.
She watched them, and it was as if they were dancing in the glow of moonlight and the sodium glare of the streetlamps. The light, the dirt, the shadows, the grime, so many subtle ingredients weaving together at once, in that one place across the street, where no-one would think to look, where no-one could see.
No-one but her.
No-one but me, she thought.
They came into her dreams, or she came into theirs. She was never sure which it was at any point or time. All that mattered to her was that she was there and they were with her. The dolls in the window, making their slow waltzing motions, their creaking balletic shows of grace, partnered with shadows that had neither limbs, nor face. Music was not there, there was only the uneasy flow of their movements around her and the scratching sound of minute particles being disturbed. Their quiet eyes of cracked and peeling paint staring off into nooks where there was nothing, corners and crannies where all she could see was dust and more darkness. And that was how it went on, with the light from the moon and the lamps streaming in through the grubby glass, the dolls dancing and dancing around and around her, and those trace elements of the night embraced in their arms. Nothing came to take her by the hand. Leaving her there, all alone, without a partner, with nothing but dirt, grit and strange light, weighing heavy in her heart.
She awoke one day to find that it was just like every other day, and this is where the horror was, the nightmare, the lie. She understood that every other day was like every other day and always would be, no matter what. She got out of bed and went across to the window, knowing what she would see, there, across the street.
The window, the dolls, unchanged, as always.
Still there, still watching, still waiting.
All this time, she thought, all these years, only now do I know what it means, what I must do. And that night, alone, she began to work, knowing that it would take a long time, a very long time, that it would take forever, in fact, to do what must be done. To not look away when she thought that she saw them glisten and breathe in the window across the road during the day. And to dance as if with a partner in the dreams when the dreams came at night. Then, only then, would the darkness come to her and proffer a fingerless hand.
The house on the corner, opposite the shop with the dolls in the window, stood quite still and quite empty. The possibility, the threat, of some strange internal movement was always upon it though, something born of shadow, sadness and profound rot. The doll, she could be seen through the window on the first floor. Standing alone, poor thing, with her small weathered face hanging loose and askew, displaying a decay that was not of the flesh but deeper and darker than we could ever know. And, if the light is right, sometimes, at night, on a clear night, she seems to glisten softly, maybe move a little as if to dance, and then begin to breathe.
END
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