Mr. John made dolls: small, colorful things stuffed with polyester batting and sprouted yarn for hair. The students watched him wrap fabric around a sphere of batting and tie thread around the head, just below where the neck would be, string knotted and pulled like a noose. He whipstitched the openings closed and the kids marveled at how he maneuvered the needle on such small limbs, in and out of the skin until the needle exited at the back and he tied it off.
He gave the doll to Hana. Hana sat at the front of the classroom because all of the established friend groups occupied the back desks.
Hana was eleven and had a soft voice you could hear only if you told the rest of the class to shut up and stop shuffling papers and snapping binder rings. She was the type of girl who sat at the edge of the lunch table and stared out the large, glass windows, hoping it’d rain so she could avoid outdoor recess: she’d rather read indoors than sit by the curb looking for uncracked pieces of chalk to draw with. She was the type of girl who bumped into half-open doors while reading and walking even though her mom told her not to but she did it anyway–because what else was more interesting to look at? She had a cute face that resembled one of those Harajuku plushies, and maybe she could be considered pretty, but certainly not the kind of pretty that other kids her age recognized. It was the kind of pretty that’d take a few years of puberty to run its course. That she was unaware of her charm only added to the charm.
Hana cradled the doll. It looked like a fairy the way it was dressed in a pixie hat, a knitted scarf and handbag, a purple crocheted skirt and teal linen blouse. It had long, hand-stitched eyelashes, dots for the nose and mouth, a blush of pink on the cheeks. “Additional accessories,” Mr. John called them. Her classmates stared and she felt the need to hide the doll with her cupped hands. This was the first doll-making demonstration Mr. John had planned—they even had two back-to-back math lessons the other day so he could schedule free time—and no one suspected he was going to give away a doll for free; the students adhered to a follow-rules-and-be-rewarded transaction system.
After school ended, Hana piled her marble notebooks and pencil case into her backpack. She covered the sharp edges with her wool hat and rested the doll on the cushion before zippering her backpack and gently swinging it on her back.
Her parents returned one hour after she got home in a predictable series of events: the garage roared, a fifteen-second rumble she felt through the walls of the house, and then the door swung open with a screech. “How was school?” they asked her. Hana replied, “Good. I got a doll today.” Her parents— father in the kitchen tossing chopped onion into a wok of hot vegetable oil, crackling and sizzling on impact, mother in the bathroom removing makeup and changing out of her blouse and black pencil skirt—said, “Good, good.” And then her mother called toward the kitchen: “Don’t forget the cauliflower, it’ll go bad soon.”
Hana propped the doll on her nightstand. It was the only pretty thing in her room. She patted the doll’s head with her thumb and pressed her fingers into its face—so soft, softer than skin, she thought as she rubbed her own cheek in comparison.
At dinner, Hana’s older sister Joy announced she’d received a summer scholarship to research hydroelectric dams and sustainable development in Paraguay. Her parents fussed about plane tickets, safety, timing. Were travel expenses included? Would this look good for college applications? And once you started asking, you sparked Joy’s rambling: her wild, gesturing hands that threatened to whack Hana in the forehead, her pigeonholed mind that indulged in these ambitious prospects for so long the bowl of soup had gone cold. Hana wondered if dolls had to care about this sort of thing: school, college, job, money. Maybe they had their own doll world and doll economy built on bartering accessories. Maybe she should move the doll to the windowsill so it could sit under natural light, so it’d be easier to scrutinize.
The next morning, Hana noticed the doll’s scarf had come loose, a few threads protruding from the otherwise tightly knit piece. Mr. John would know how to fix it. And he did. Hana sat at a desk next to Mr. John’s wide teacher desk, a minimalist setup consisting of one ballpoint pen and a binder-clipped stack of papers, watching as he quickly unwound and restitched the scarf during recess.
“Would you like to learn?” he asked. Maybe she had been staring too intently.
“Yes, please,” she said.
She began to eat lunch and spend recess in the classroom, learning to trace and cut body patterns from cloth, stuff and stitch limbs together, and work with different fabrics to design the doll’s wardrobe. No one asked where she’d gone during those periods; her classmates just assumed she got back to the classroom early when they found her always sitting at her desk, pre-lesson activities already done.
A few mornings later, she discovered her doll’s eyelashes had come loose, and since she hadn’t yet learned to sew faces, she brought it back to school for Mr. John’s help.
“It’s hard to stitch them back precisely as is,” he told her. Mr. John slipped a seam ripper under the white string, broke the stitches, and removed loose threads until the head fell off. He handed her the body and she stared down its gaping neck, full of white pillowy fluff. “Keep it safe,” he said. He poked a needle into the face—just a balled-up piece of fabric now—and from the tip of the metal grew long, black lashes. The four-minute bell rang. Hana could see the kids climbing off the playground and filing into lines to return to class. “We can finish later,” Mr. John promised, sticking the needle into the head and placing it in his drawer.
Hana could not pay attention in class, not when they reenacted Leif Erikson’s discovery of North America, not when they graphed linear equations on lined rather than expensive graph paper. Her headless doll lay in her desk, behind her textbooks and supplies. She worried that the lack of head left a gaping wound ripe for contamination, that pencil shavings or dust might find their way into the body. Maybe she should’ve asked Mr. John to temporarily sew its neck shut, make it a lop-sided, four-legged starfish. When the last class ended and the students packed their bags, she pretended to be engrossed in Lord of the Flies even though she found the book too pessimistic and irrationally fatalistic. It was the only book on her desk. As soon as the last student exited, she shut the book and tugged out her doll, careful to prevent its stuffing from catching onto spiral notebook rings.
“Will it be easy to fix?” she asked. She needed to catch the late bus home, the bus all the athletes rode after practice and the problem children rode after detention and the nerds rode after robotics club, which gave her an hour.
“Sure thing,” Mr. John said. “It shouldn’t take long to finish the eyelashes. Would you like some goldfish?”
Hana nodded. Mr. John had a thirty-pack box of cheddar goldfish crackers that he’d give to students who answered his tougher questions correctly. Hana never raised her hand, so she never received any snacks. But she’d watch the students munch on them throughout class, the yellow crumbs falling into the spine of their books, the rounded crackers collapsing on impact with incisors. Her parents never let her eat goldfish or any Pepperidge Farms snacks. The best snacks she’d been allowed to eat were freeze-dried apples and miso soup. I got lucky today, she thought as Mr. John rummaged for a pack. He pulled the two sides of plastic apart, creating a perfect opening without tearing the bag. Then he inserted his hand and plucked one cracker out. “Open wide,” he said.
Hana had seen the boys play this game in the cafeteria. They’d aim cupcake sprinkles in each other’s mouths and whoever caught it got to eat the whole cupcake. She stretched her jaw wider than she knew she was capable of— even the dentist said her mouth was tiny. He threw the fish and she observed its projectile motion, shifting slightly so she’d be in its path. As soon as her tongue detected the cheesy saltiness on her tongue, she clamped her jaw shut as though it might escape and chewed. It was the most delicious snack she’d ever eaten. Mr. John handed her the rest of the bag, and as she reached over, his calloused fingers brushed hers. He began to sew.
“How did you learn to make such detailed dolls?” she asked as she popped another goldfish into her mouth.
“They’re not that detailed though, are they?” Mr. John smiled slightly. “Just eyes and a nose and mouth, I miss a lot of nuances to a real human face. But I guess you could say I like paying attention to details—what people wear, why something looks good or bad, how it might look better on a doll.” He maneuvered the little ball of cloth so the opening where it should attach to the body faced her; it gaped like a foaming mouth and wasn’t that a funny idea—the base of a neck as an orifice instead—the whole face would need to be reoriented to fit the image. She wondered if this was what being observant meant. She proposed this idea to Mr. John.
He clicked his tongue. “Why would you do that? Dolls are supposed to be pretty, not monsters. And most humans are pretty ugly, if you ask me, so I have to work extra hard to only stitch the good features.”
But the thought had planted itself in her brain and she imagined gluing the head back on, the face attached to the neck stub and the unsealed head left in the air like a snout. Mr. John must have noticed her fixation because he asked, “Would you like to see some of the other dolls I’ve made? You might understand their proper form if you see some more examples.”
“What examples?” she asked.
“I have dolls wearing hand-sewn kimonos patterned with boats on swirling water, dolls wearing kanzashi with fabric flowers and small bells and long chains of silk. Those took the longest to make.”
Hana had never worn kanzashi in her hair before, but she had seen her mother wear a tsunami kanzashi in old wedding photos. She admitted it was beautiful. But the long hairpins and silk flowers would be beautiful no matter where you stuck them in the head, if the head were rotated ninety degrees, if it were inside-out.
“I’d like to see them,” she said.
“The rest of my collection is at my house. It’s a five-minute drive from here. We’d be back before the late bus. Shall we go?” Mr. John asked, standing up and placing the unfinished head into his briefcase, its half eyelash blinking from between the leather handles. He left no window for her to object, but still, she had stranger-danger intuition drilled into her by her parents who, accustomed to the safe streets of Tokyo, were convinced every sidewalk and alleyway in America was dangerous.
But Hana wanted to know if those dolls would still be pretty if she twisted and rotated and ripped off their heads. If she knew, she might be able to fix her doll without Mr. John’s help. She might be okay with the way it was: the batting spilling from the neck hole, but at least she’d know there was enough stuffing. So she followed.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Pidgeonholes, Jellyfish Review, Cheap Pop, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. She is an editor for Heavy Feather Review and assistant fiction editor for Pithead Chapel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen