In a small village a bride doll tires of living by herself. I will go out and find a husband, she says, and that very day she sets out to find him.
After passing through several towns she at last comes upon a curious doll shop managed by an even more curious shopkeeper doll. I am looking for a husband, says the bride doll. The shopkeeper does not speak but he motions the bride doll to a nearby rack.
The bride doll feels sorry for a man doll whose plastic eyes have fallen out. I will take this one and fix him, she says to the shopkeeper, who frowns but says nothing.
Many months pass after the bride doll has fixed her husband's eyes and one day she says to him, I think it is time for us to have children. The husband doll picks her up and locks her in the icebox. When at last he opens the door, the bride doll smiles weakly and gives him a hug.
When she decides again to ask her husband about making children, the husband doll ties her in a box until morning. And as often as she repeats her request, he responds in a similar fashion, but the bride doll never complains.
A day comes when the bride doll hears a knock against a closet door. When she opens the door, she is surprised to find that the shopkeeper doll she had met years earlier is tied up. What are you doing here? she asks. The shopkeeper doll does not reply, and the bride doll shuts the door again.
When her husband is home from work, she says, husband, there is a man in our closet.
His children are dead, he answers. I have shut him in our closet so he cannot hear them scream.
That very night, the bride doll helps her husband with his bath. She runs the water and begins to clean him. She holds his head under to rinse his hair. As he smiles at her from beneath the water she continues to rinse his hair. The bride doll begins to hear the cries of children, and she hears them long after the doll bubbles no longer surface.
When at last she looks to her husband, she sees that he has become the strange shopkeeper doll, and she begins at that moment to feel her bride doll body welling up with child.
"The Bride Doll Finds a Husband" from The Collection
Inspired by Susan Gibb's Equality
Oh dear, is this what a nice little marital revelation has spawned? This deep and dark that comes in nightmares and daydreams?
ReplyDeleteLOVE it. Love also the fact that the boy doll in the image appears to be headless.