She’d thought at first it was the Salford Devil, come back from the stories and curled into her child’s bed. It was a put-together thing, same as the Devil, with one beautiful carved wooden arm outside of the covers, plus that worn bolster of a head: it reminded her of a woman she’d once seen with hyacinth blue eyes and a jaw swollen by a purpling growth, a woman deformed and beautiful simultaneously, not one state despite the other. The doll’s eyes were green and large, the mouth, near where the head tapered into something like a neck, sherbety, lips parted to show little painted teeth. The
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