by Paige Eaton
I. In Her Eyes
Her eyes pin me to the museum wall. Her porcelain skin, made in
the image of consumption, is blemished with two faint clouds of blush
and tiny, chaste lips. The hair fastened to her stoneware scalp billows
out in an onyx crown. Within her glass case, the dappled blue and
white gown she exhibits bursts across my pupils. She is my
captivation. Behind this mistress in blue is a queen. Her golden curls
flow gently down her back and her chest is puffed out with pride.
She is made to be on display. Her rosy cheeks and tight lips betray her
sense of belonging, and the choking collar around her neck her ownership.
The lace adorning her bosom and hat are her rich master’s accessories.
I wonder where she is looking, her glass eyes blank and yet unyielding.
II. In Her House
Her house is adorned with all sorts of expensive ornaments: Persian rugs
recreated with calico slips and a silk handkerchief for the bedspread. She
beckons you in, points out the hand-painted china plates and velvet couch
in the corner, her children spawned from demons staring at you with their
black button eyes from the nursery. I tried to climb the staircase to the attic
where she spends her days on insanity, Bertha doesn’t realize she is just a
toy, a blank slate for another imagination. So dreadfully pale, endlessly white,
blindingly bright, their skin raises starkly against the ruddy hues of the living
room, a family of vampires, consumed by their lust for life. Their beady black
eyes spew judgment across my simple clothes and peering face.
III. In Her Wardrobe
A doll shows off her fortune in wardrobes as big as her owner’s. Jade
jewelry glints at her breast and ears, the true gold sparkling around the
rosy-blue gemstones. Silk dresses pour out of her bosom and human hair
weeps in curls down her scalp. She poses for pictures in the hands of her
sullen mistress. Her face is stretched in a cherubic smile; puffy pink cheeks
and big eyes pop from her child-like face. She wants to forget that she is
pinned to the wall, her mistress long dead, captured only in the grayscale
photograph framed next to her. Her eyes can only stare out at the slobbery
children and listless adults climbing by her crucifixion. The dolls shows off her
fortune to visitors, pleading with them silently not to notice her wrinkled gown,
an indignity she is loath to forget. She begs for new earrings to replace
the rusting ones embedded in her ears, ears that ring with the screeches of
children, so very different from the voice of her soft, gentlewomanly mistress.
The dust itches her skin. She wants to climb out of it. Unfortunately for her, no
help will come. She has become an antique.
IV. In Her Body
Her name is Tete Jumeau with Lamb. Gears turn her head up and down, side to
side, a dance of clockwork, mechanized and stiff. The lamb in the basket clutched
in one china hand bleats, the many years of use not dampening his throat. Her eyes
are paperweights. She is made of unglazed, cardboard porcelain. She is over 100
years old, with the face of a vampire to match. My eyes were drawn so inexplicably
to hers; she dragged me into her iron insides, veins of steel pulsing with rusted blood.
Jumeau was her maker but I made her. I turned the crank on her back, forced her
eyes to come alive. We share a brain. In this hall of play, my own dalliance is putting
pen to paper. The moment between us is broken in a splash of sparkling screams,
children invading my mind. I walk on and she stills, her story ending, her eyes dark
and simple glass yet again, the desperation to be more than a marionette lost forever.
Paige Eaton (she/her) is a poet who is currently teaching English in South Korea and is originally from Rochester, New York. Her work has appeared in Dark Entries, Does it Have Pockets, Long Winded Anthology and Unlikely Stories among others, and is forthcoming in Pink Hydra and The Bitchin’ Kitsch.