The little faces turned to Violet, the most unusual of Emma's dolls. A gothic doll, Emma had fallen in love with her pinstripe dress at a yard sale. She'd even made Violet her black cat out of felt.

  " By the time I was sold, I hadn't been loved for a very long time. The yard sale was how I found Emma. She loved me more than I thought anyone could."

  Violet gave her purring cat a squeeze.

  "So...anything could happen to us?" Alice asked.

  "It seems so," Crystal and Winter said, both sitting back. "All we can do is support each other and wait."

  Alice stared at the ground, deep in contemplation. "Is that all?" she asked. "Wait for our fate to be decided? Spend decades in a musty basement, or risk being sold to someone who won't love us?"

  "What else can be done?" Violet asked.

  "We could run away."

  The dolls' heads snapped so fast towards Alice the stuffed animals glanced over from the bed at the clicking.

  "Alice," Marjorie said slowly. "You're suggesting breaking your Doll's Duty."

  "Is self-preservation so wrong? Valerie won't notice we're gone for ages," Alice argued.

  Crystal and Winter looked at each other. "She can't even look at us right now. If the sight of us is a painful reminder, maybe it would be kinder to leave," they said.

  Violet was silent, plastic purple eyes wide as saucers. Marjorie looked at them all with far less kind eyes.

  "I'm not going to sit here and listen to you all try to justify abandoning this family," she spat.

  "Easy for you to say when you're a family heirloom," Alice snapped back. "You're guaranteed to be passed down to the next generation."

  "Do you see anyone left?!" Marjorie yelled, gesturing around the room. "Do you think I'll stay just because maybe one day, Valerie will heal enough to have a new family and a new child to love me? No. I'll stay here because it's what Emma would have wanted! She'd want us to be here for her mother!"

  Her shouting took the other dolls by surprise. Plastic and yarn brows rose, illuminated by the light of the jewelry box. In the quiet once again, they could hear Valerie's pained sobs.

  "But what can we do for her?" Violet asked.

  And at that, Marjorie deflated. For all her experience over all her decades, she didn't know the answer to that question.

  "There has to be something," Marjorie whispered.

  "Marjorie, Emma was my child," Alice said. "Now she's gone. My heart shatters for Valerie, but my Doll's Duty in this home is over."

  Violet winced. Crystal and Winter spun their heads to Marjorie, waiting for her rebuttal.

  They didn't expect to see thick tears dripping down her china face.

  "Valerie was my child once too," Marjorie whispered.

  Crystal and Winter covered their mouths. Violet reached out to comfort Marjorie. Alice tried to think of something to say, but she couldn't find the words. In the silence, Marjorie wept, echoing the muffled sobs of Valerie outside the empty room.

  Barring physical destruction, dolls don't die. Death is already a foreign concept for them to understand, to accept.

  But heartbreak isn't.

  And in that heartbreak, the dolls and Valerie were united. But what comfort could they offer behind a closed door, to Valerie of all people, too grief stricken to let anyone in?

  There was a rustle from Violet's lap as her felt cat awoke. With a curious mew, his eyes darted over to Emma's jewelry box, and he leaped inside.

  "Kitty, no..." Violet called.

  Alice stared at the little black cat chasing the darting lights. Suddenly, something clicked for her.

  "Violet," she said, shooting up. "Didn't Emma make that cat for you?"

  "Y-yes. With Valerie's help," Violet stammered.

  Alice put her hands on Marjorie's shoulders. "I have an idea," she said. "I don't know if it will work, but...listen."

  The dolls worked together, gathering things from around the room. They talked to the stuffed animals on the bed, to the action figures in the closet, the collectibles on the shelves, and added more to their full arms. Finally, they assembled together, and began to fill the box.

  Shells Emma saved from beach trips, hidden from view on the high shelves. Pictures Emma had drawn that had slipped behind the bed. Friendship bracelets she'd woven that the action figures had cleaned off the floor.

  Crystal and Winter each took off the snowflake hair clips Emma had affixed to their ponytails to tell them apart. Alice put in her namesake book, the very one Emma had loved so much. And Marjorie put in a locket, one that Emma had discovered around her porcelain neck, secreted beneath the collar of her dress. Emma had had no idea it had belonged to her great-grandmother, that she'd been the first to discover it in a hundred years.

  Violet reached in, giving her felt cat a pet. "Take care of her," she said.

  And together, they closed the jewelry box and pushed it.

  The crash echoed through the house and the distant sobs went silent. A few moments later, footsteps echoed down the hall and the door opened.

  Valerie blinked into the darkness, flicking on the light. On the floor by the window seat, she saw Emma's dolls and jewelry box scattered about. With a sniffle, she walked over to lift up the box.

  It was heavier than she remembered.

  The dolls held their breaths as Valerie opened the box and combed through its contents. Some she must have known about—others would be new to her. When she got to Violet's cat, she held the little felt creation in her hands.

  And with a choked sob, she hugged the cat to her chest. For the first time since Emma passed, Valerie smiled through her tears.

  She remembered making this little cat with Emma, how insistent she was that her gothic doll needed a black cat. Valerie looked through the box, at all the priceless treasures and memories within.

  This wasn't Valerie's story.

  But it was the start of something for her.

  With a shaky breath, Valerie looked over at Emma's dolls. "Let's put you lovely girls back."

  Carefully, Valerie arranged the dolls in their usual semicircle. She lingered at Marjorie, reaching out to touch her chipped porcelain fingers.

  Valerie collected her box of treasures, and turned off the light to Emma's room. She left the door open—not all the way, but enough for some light to shine in through the darkness.

  It didn't feel like an empty room anymore. It felt like a room that had been full, and in some ways, it still was. Full of life and love.

  Valerie would never know just how much.

  About the Author

  Rachel Nussbaum is a writer and artist from the Big Island of Hawaii. Her short stories and poetry have been featured in multiple anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk by Running Press (2015) and Little Girl Lost: Thirteen Tales of Youth Disrupted by Mannison Press (2019). In the summer of 2021, Mannison Press will be pleased to publish her first novella, We Rotted in the Bitterlands. Rachel recently graduated college and moved to California, where she hopes to grow her creative career and one day write and illustrate her own novels and comic books.

  Smashwords profile here: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/RachelNussbaum

  12. Childish Things

  Matthew Brady

  The one thing the boy had not expected to stumble upon that day was a tiger, least of all a tiger in a damask dress. But that is what happened. Wearing the same suit he had worn on the plane, early one morning he snuck out of his relatives' country house (house, for he still could not think of it as home, no matter how many summers he spent there), climbed over the garden wall, and wandered deep into the flatwoods that comprised the backyard. Here he disappeared, which was a simple enough task in a place where the oaks and loblolly pines stood so tall and knit so thick they made a blue patchwork of the sky and where the muddy stamp of every footprint gushed water.

  It was here, in a clearing of pine needles, that he found the abandoned toy shop.

  At least, that's what the words stenciled across the cracked transom window said. "Hinterland's," it spelled in flaked coppery lettering. But in truth, it was little more than a shack of slatted wood, the white paint all but chipped away. The boy had no earthly notion as to why it should be there. Nonetheless, he went inside, if for no other reason than to get away from his thoughts—the heavy, unseen weight that hung around him wherever he went, like a heavy suitcase he could not put down.

  He strolled aimlessly among the dust-caked shelves, where the antique toys were wrapped under the cobwebs of ages. Clownish marionettes and porcelain babies and tin soldiers and cymbal monkeys, even a few splintery rocking horses.

  But none of them could compare to the magnificent doll posed in the display window. A tiger! No, a tigress, for she was most certainly a lady, albeit a remarkably tiny one (standing only four inches high, at most). She was exquisitely dressed in miniature clothes: a damask blouse with a lacy collar and cuffs, a lily-print petticoat, and patent leather shoes, all so well-cut they were almost certainly hand-tailored. But it was the fur that caught him, from the points of her ears to the tip of her elegant tail: velvet soft, in sunlit hues of orange and yellow, and brushed with glossy stripes so black they had their own sheen. The glass eyes twinkled a greenish-gold.

  And because his heart already knew what his head did not, he found his hand floating ahead of him, reaching toward her. But then it dropped. The words of his parents, from the drive to the airport, churned in his head.

  We've already enrolled you. You're going, son, and that's final. It's time you started thinking about the future. It's time you grew up.

  Time you grew up...

  He turned away with a profound sigh, and then a small, tinkling voice spoke.

  "Don't be sad."

  Startled, the boy spun and looked around him. But there was no one else in the shop; no one living, at any rate. So he asked, "Who said that?"

  "I did," the voice chimed again, and this time there was no mistaking where it came from. The tiger did not move an inch. It had no movable mouth with which to speak, and yet somehow it was managing, as though its thoughts were being transmitted into sound.

  The boy blinked, baffled. Here was a very peculiar situation; so peculiar, in fact, that an ordinary response was the only kind he could think to give. "And who are you?"

  "I'm Tiger Lily. And as I already told you, please don't be sad."

  "But I have a good reason to be."

  "Oh, I don't doubt that. It's just that it disheartens me to see any child sad."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Because I was made to make them happy. But as you can see, no boys or girls have come to this place in quite some time."

  "Ah. So you're lonely," the boy said, the words echoing softly in the shop, telling him how he felt.

  Tiger Lily gave this some thought. "Perhaps 'lonely' isn't quite the word. 'Unused' is closer to it, I think. It's a sad thing, and a little painful, to know your purpose and yet be denied it. To be looked over, passed over, when you know if you were only given a chance..."

  The boy put his hands in his pockets, looked down at his shoes, then nodded. "Well, I can do that for you, Miss Tiger Lily."

  The greenish-gold eyes sparkled. "Do you really mean that?" she said, then, timidly, "Please don't get my hopes up..."

  "Of course I mean it! Here, let me carry you."

  "Oh, thank you!" Tiger Lily chirruped as the boy lifted her carefully from the display window. "A hundred splendid thank-yous!"

  "It's no trouble," the boy said.

  "Even so, you've made me very happy," said Tiger Lily, "so in return, I'll do whatever I can to make you happy, too."

  And she did. In the weeks that followed, they were never far from each other's side. At her suggestions, they found a trove of delightful things to do. There were dandelions to be blown, stalks of onion grass to be chewed, clouds to be sculpted, and picnics to partake of, where linens were spread on jungle grass and dainty china teacups (secretly purloined from the dining room cupboard) were filled with honeysuckle nectar. She told jokes that made them laugh until they were breathless, ghost stories that made them shiver and huddle close, and, most importantly, where the best wind-fallen branches could be found for making a tent and camping out under the stars. There were so many things to be discovered, not the least of which was the airy lightness the boy felt whenever he was around his companion, as though the weight had simply floated away on a breath of thistledown...

  But then the day came when his relatives made a discovery as well. His cousins, to be precise, loutish twins his own age. They fell upon the boy and his tiger while they were out in the garden, war-whooping as they shoved and slapped and yanked the boy's hair.

  "Looky here, sissy boy's found himself a doll!"

  "No wonder he's got no friends! He's a widdle baby!"

  "That ain't just a doll, either! It's a tiger! And ya know what they say about catchin' a tiger by the tail, don'tcha?"

  Working together, one cousin swiped Tiger Lily and held her, while his cohort grabbed her tail and pulled as hard as he could. Over the boy's yells, his pleas for them to stop, came a sound of ripping fabric as the tail flew off in a puff of white stuffing. Laughing, the twins tossed their trophy onto the lawn and departed.

  The boy picked up the tail, then did the same for his companion. He cried over her.

  "Please don't cry," Tiger Lily told him. "It doesn't hurt, I swear."

  "But I don't know how to sew it back on!"

  "Then just hold on to it until you learn."

  "I can't do anything," the boy sobbed. "I...I really am a baby."

  Something changed after that day, although she did not notice it right away. The boy put her on the shelf above his bed, but since he always did this, Tiger Lily gave it no thought—at first. But what she did soon notice was how, little by little, the boy stopped taking her with him whenever he disembarked from the house. That alone was foreboding enough, but what was worse was how, also little by little, he stopped speaking to her.

  She harbored a distressing suspicion as to why this was so, so one night, as the boy lay in bed, she knew she had to voice it.

  "Are you ashamed of me?"

  She could not see the boy's face from the shelf, but she heard the rustle of his sheets as he turned over. At length, he answered, "No...not of you."

  "Then why don't we play together anymore?" she cried. "Did I do something wrong? Is it because you think I'm ugly since I lost my tail?"

  "That's not it."

  "Then why?" she pleaded. "Please tell me!"

  "Because I'm going away, Tiger Lily," the boy said, his voice taut. "My parents are always busy, always going on business trips for their work, so they're sending me to boarding school once summer is over." She heard him sniffle in the balmy dark. "And I won't be able to take you with me. If my folks found you, they'd sell you off for sure."

  She had felt no pain when she lost her tail, that was true enough. But hearing these words now more than compensated for it.

  "So...you're putting me away?" she mewled.

  For a while, the boy said nothing. And when he did, all he could say was, "I'm sorry."

  "Me too," said Tiger Lily, her voice full of tears in a body that could not shed them.

  On the last day of summer, he left her in the shop's display window where they'd first met. He told her that he would come back next year, but Tiger Lily only told him goodbye; she didn't know what more there was to say. As the boy went out the door, as she watched him melt from view into the flatwoods beyond, she knew there was plenty left to be said.

  "There's no heart in all this fluff, but I feel it breaking, just the same.

  "Is this what love feels like, then? I'd sooner have my tail resewn and torn away over and over again for the remainder of my days than go on enduring this.

  "You'll come back, won't you?

  "Won't you?"

  The cymbal monkeys, hearing her words, chattered and jeered from their shelves.

  "Come back?" they hooted. "Would you listen to yourself? They never come back! It's the oldest trick in the book! They have their fun, and then they're done! Nothing but an embarrassment, you are! Something to look back on with a cringe!"

  Tiger Lily did not want to listen to them, but a wall of time was building itself around her, brick by brick, hour by hour, day by day, and week by week. A monolith rising into months. Into years. Calendared only by a numbing pirouette of sunrays and moonbeams. The familiar dust of the shop trickled back in, settling into the folds of her clothes, into her fur. Hope, outrageous though it was, was all she had left, though she was slowly coming to the conclusion that hope could be equally as cruel as despair.

  She waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  She waited for so long she eventually forgot that she was waiting, and then fell into profound slumber.

  The greenish-gold eyes, dulled by the hands of the clock, brightened into wakefulness at the sound of knuckles rapping on glass. Tiger Lily stirred, then gazed out the display window, where a strange man in a business suit, holding a suitcase, was gazing solemnly back at her. She stared, uncomprehending, but she did not speak. The adults never heard her; she'd learned that long ago.

  But the man's interest did not wane. Instead, he entered the shop and walked right up to her. She saw the suitcase in his hand and was afraid. Here, she thought bitterly, was most likely a common burglar come to snatch her away and sell her off someplace. Someplace where she'd never see the boy again. She'd waited all this time, and now it would all be for nothing.

  The man set the suitcase on the counter and flipped the latches...

  Tiger Lily cried out in anguish, "Don't do this, I beg you! I have to be here when he comes back, or he'll..." Her voice broke into tears.

  "Please don't cry, Tiger Lily," the man said in a gentle voice as he opened the suitcase and pulled out...a tail. An elegant tail: velvet soft, in sunlit hues of orange and yellow, and brushed with glossy stripes so black they had their own sheen. In the suitcase there was also a needle and thread. "I...I learned to sew. You see? I can fix you now."