The Doll - Part 1

by Natalia Emery Trindade

The mother entered the daughter's room, who was sleeping as immobile as a doll. It was time to wake her up for one more day, but she would gladly forget to do it were it possible. Her desire was to let the doll sleep for the rest of her life until she reached old age through sleep and died, without ever having been awake. And then, without ever having awakened her, transfer her small body quietly from the bed directly to the grave. The thought of the years of life the doll still had before her, starting with what remained of childhood, adolescence, adult life and part of old age, made the gesture of awakening the child unbearable to the mother. How would she be able to tolerate the doll's presence until death tore them apart? She would like to wake her up only after she was dead herself, and not even then. Her own maternal desire, to play with dolls, had finished many years before, as soon as the daughter stopped being a baby. The independent doll, with its own personality, wasn't interesting to her.

The mother gathered her forces and woke the doll with a scream:

"Wake up! It's time to get up!"

The voice echoed strident and authoritarian in the sensitive ears of the doll. She opened her glass eyes and saw the mother's sharp gaze. She seems to return from the world of the dead, thought the mother as she observed the daughter's tragic face, which was absent any desire to live, as unreal and plastic as the industrial face of a doll. She kept looking at that creature lying on the bed: a mound of a body, articulated chunks of meat, arms and legs united to a trunk. The head linked to the neck by an internal rope.

The daughter got up and dressed in the clothes that were laid out on the chair. It was her infantile duty to separate the school uniform the night before. She appeared in the kitchen ready for breakfast. As a doll that had been forgotten for years in a box of old toys, her hair had very ancient entanglements. The mother became irritated and screamed:

"Once again you forgot to comb the hair!"

"I combed it, mother, I swear," the doll defended herself.

"Well, if you call that combing!"

The mother approached the daughter, grabbed her by the arm piercing the firm flesh with red nails and dragged her into the bathroom. She forcefully opened the mirrored wardrobe door and grabbed a plastic comb from within, whose teeth she forced into the nylon threads of doll's hair.

"Owwwww, complained the doll, as if she had been turned upside down."

"Shut up!"

With a dominating and oppressive hand firmly holding the head, the mother forced the teeth of the comb down, which jammed in the hair knots. The girl's scalp burned, but the mother didn't know that dolls could feel pain.

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