by the dollhouse and its inhabitants for hours, stuck in an endless loop of gazing, sighing, stationary admiring. Inevitably, they’d forget everything: why they had originally come over, who Laura’s father was or what he did, how they had found themselves there at all. Once, a man arrived for a business meeting with Laura’s father and became so enraptured with the dolls that he entirely forgot the existence of his family. When Laura and her brothers came down for breakfast the next day, they saw him standing outside of their window, with his nose pressed up against the glass. After that Laura’s father kept the dolls in the dollhouse when they had company.
As a child, Laura was fascinated by the dolls and their miniature features: their impossibly thin hands, porcelain-slick knees, microscopic eyelashes. She dreamt of playing with them. She dreamt of dressing them up as royalty or patron saints. She imagined forcing them to attend grand balls in tiny, ornate masks.
When she turned thirteen, the dolls began to torment her. She couldn’t sleep. She had dreams of the dolls attacking her, tiny hands reaching for her throat, their teeth bared. By the time she was fourteen, Laura hated them. She threw fit after fit, screaming at her mother to take the dolls down, throw them away. Her mother was an easier and more forgiving target than her father, who was like a crooked dartboard in a carnival game: slightly tilted to the left, forever rigged to fuck up your outcome. She could never get a good glimpse of him, even after he died, when every time Laura closed her eyes she saw him standing right in front of her.
~
He built dolls and dollhouses and museums and mausoleums while his wife kept watch and sewed us miniature dresses and petticoats all made out of string. The children call him All-Knowing, Yahweh, the Unforgiving God, behind his back.
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