Cloth/Fur
The cloth doll wears a red cloak tied off with thin ribbon at her neck and two neat braids of black yarn which fall to either side of her blushing face. When you flip her skirt over her head, a second doll with a wolf’s head appears. The wolf’s felt tongue unfurls from its furry face.
Girl.
Flip.
Wolf.
Flip.
Girl.
Flip.
Wolf.
Flip.
Although they are attached, the girl and the wolf never appear at the same time. One is always seeking to conceal the other.
The girl is very sweet. She even went along with it when on two separate occasions her first two boyfriends both, as a joke, slapped her in the exact same spot on the white couch in her parents’ basement. A little bit of dark humor is harmless, and she can laugh along.
The wolf hates the girl. She leaves their conjoined body under threat and hungry. It would eat her if it could.
The girl is professional. She smiles along at the sexist jokes of her coworker, even though she begins to dread her shifts with him. She doesn’t even say anything when, during a staff meeting about how to handle sexual harassment in the workplace, the same coworker jokes that he needs a demonstration of sexual assault to understand the concept.
The wolf is the one left to deal with the emotions that have stuck like blood clots in their shared circulatory system. The wolf eats things late at night that the girl wouldn’t let herself have during the day, and the girl wonders why the wolf is so hungry, when she has mastered the art of self-denial.
The girl is very humble. When her ex told her that her poetry could be “more deep” during their breakup, she nodded her head along. She can take constructive criticism.
Poetry is the one place that the wolf can collaborate with the girl, where it can show a bit of claw and tooth and the girl won’t flinch. The wolf wishes it could claw the girl to shreds, but if she bleeds out, so will it.
The girl . . . does not hate the wolf. She admires it for its wildness, for its ability to be honest about what it wants. Still, she worries that it will make others uncomfortable, and so, she smothers the wolf with cloth and makes it a muzzle of red ribbon wrapped around and around and around.
Joints
The black canopy I got as a gift for Christmas three years ago falls to either side of my bed and enfolds us in its dark and gauzy curtains. He reclines his blond head against the metal bed frame as our hands interlock, and I wonder if he thinks that the canopy is juvenile. What once seemed elegant and mysterious now just seems like cheap mosquito netting, and I can see the places where the dust clings and where two dead boxelder bugs have gotten caught.
“Let me do it,” he says.
“No.”
“C’mon.”
“No, it hurts.”
“It does not. Let me do it.”
“. . . Fine.”
He selects my left pointer finger and pushes it down toward my palm until the first knuckle makes a sound like the bone is fracturing. Then he bends the finger at the next knuckle and pushes again. Crack. He moves me easily, and I’m reminded of a childhood doll that had bendable joints.
He takes the top knuckle and twists it to the side. There’s no sound— that one rarely works on me. I stare at the places where the metal bars of my bed frame twist themselves into black hearts behind his back.
I used to fidget with the doll’s leg, savoring the crackling sound it made when I bent her knee back and forth, as I considered which doll I wanted to be her boyfriend.
He takes my middle finger. Crack, crack, crack.
Once I had selected the boyfriend, then the doll game could begin. My pinky—crack.
The two dolls kissed with their eyes open as if they could not bear to look away from the other for even a moment. They were a beautiful couple. Perfect, predictable.
Some knuckles hurt worse than others, but I wince every time he presses down. He responds to my recoiling with statements such as, “You’re fiiiiine,” and, “It’s not that bad,” which he murmurs near my ear.
Once, in my parents’ basement, a boy laid his palm hard and flat against my chest, pinning me to the mattress in the guest bedroom. There was a cracking sound from deep within my sternum, and I turned my face into the pillowcase to cry. I didn’t want to become distorted by pain, made human and vulnerable. Allowing my pain to be seen would have been to admit that something was wrong—either with him or with me, and that I wasn’t able to control the situation despite my begging him on multiple occasions to be more gentle. But I am not that girl anymore, and that boy is not this boy is not this boy is not this boy. After all, I said that he could do this, didn’t I?
“No thumbs,” I say.
“I know. Other hand.”
I raise my right hand from my lap and offer it to him. At least he respects that thumbs are strictly off limits. Last time, I lay in bed with my thumbs hurting for minutes afterwards. I remind him of this.
“I know,” he says again, “no thumbs.” And see—I can move him too.
I don’t know what happened to the doll with the malleable joints. Was it one of the ones that I used for hair-cutting practice? It probably ended up balding at some secondhand store on top of a pile of other naked, plastic bodies. Or else it’s still in the bin of old toys that’s been sealed shut in the closet of my parents’ basement guest bedroom.
His blue eyes spark as he begins on my other hand, and I keep my eyes on him. I can’t bear to look away for even a moment.
Sophia Thimmes has been published in Sink Hollow, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and Luna Station Quarterly. She can often be found hiking in the woods, munching on carb-based foods, and becoming overly enthused about fat snowflakes falling in Utah, where she studies creative writing at Utah State University and works as an English tutor.
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