Laura walked forward quietly. She felt like she might disturb it, somehow, if she made a sudden sound or movement. Worry gnawed at her chest. Every twitch of her hand sent the glow emanating from the axe off-course, sparks of gold careening around the room, throwing her into a new environment with different configurations of shadow and light. Her heart jumped onto her tongue and made itself at home there. The sound of her own body was a threat. Any sudden movement, anything that seemed wrong, off-kilter, unexpected. Her shoulders felt like shoelaces, yanked and tied together so tightly it ached.
Laura imagined her father pulling her mouth apart with dental equipment: towering over her, a mask covering his face, his eyes brimming with blood. When he picked her heart up from her throat with two fingers and examined it under a magnifying glass, the ghost of her father would say No, disappointed. No, this isn’t supposed to be here at all.
As she knelt down in front of the dollhouse, Laura realized that she had not seen the inside since she was a child. Her mother, out of sentiment or scorn, had pulled the walls apart and propped them open with books from her father’s study. It was unnaturally obscene: infinitesimal bedrooms and kitchens, spewing forth like entrails, corpse-green moths scattered over every possible surface.
Laura’s mouth went dry. The closest doll was lying in bed, tucked underneath a white sheet, facing down. Was it supposed to be funny? Did her father dress them up like they were dead on purpose? Nausea crawled up her throat like tendrils of seaweed. Hands shaking, Laura pulled the doll out of its bed. There was a scrap of pink fabric around its neck— a makeshift noose, Laura thought, and felt ashamed for thinking it— and she tried to be gentle while untangling it from the doll’s neck. When she was finished, Laura held the fabric up to the golden light of the axe. It was a scarf. One she recognized, one that she would never forget.
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