Writing Prompt Wednesday: Crushed
Writing Prompt Wednesday: Crushed
Each Wednesday, I share something I am working on, guided by a writing prompt. Writing prompts help me flex my creative muscle, shape ideas and characters and build narratives. Enjoy!
Writing Prompt: Write a story where a creature turns up in an unexpected way.
I was so surprised when I got the doll for Christmas. I hadn’t asked for a china doll. It wasn’t really the kind of thing that I was interested in. I was 12 and I was beginning to lose interest in dolls in general but a fussy china doll in 1800’s garb gave me strange mixed emotions.
She seemed kind of precious. She was, after all, made of porcelain. And unlike a Barbie or a Cabbage Patch Doll, she seemed like something meant to be admired and saved rather than played with. Which meant that she was for grown girls and not little kids. So I put her in my mom’s antique rocking chair and put her in the corner of my bedroom where she sat, silently watching me grow up with her perfect blonde curls, her mutton sleeves, and her unmoving face. Silent.
When I married and moved into my first home, she was one of the first things my mom brought over to the house. Mom showed up with a box of sundry items from my childhood bedroom and the doll was peeking out of the top, her bonnet slid off to the side but with the same face. Silent.
I didn’t know what to do with the doll and didn’t think much about her but she never felt right in my home. I never could find the right spot for her. Maybe I didn’t like her watching me. Maybe she didn’t match the drapes. Either way, I finally placed her in a cedar chest in our guest bedroom and forgot all about her, in there with old blankets and dresses and things I’d saved.
One day, my middle kid (the one who kind of liked to be a tattletale) told me her siblings had been known to get the doll out and play with it. I was surprised because I hadn’t thought about the doll in years.
“Mom, where did that doll come from?” she asked. I told her I had gotten it as a Christmas gift when I was about her age and that she sat in my bedroom as I was growing up.
“Was she always so scary?” she asked.
“Scary?” I replied. “I don’t remember her being scary. What do you mean?”
“Oh, she just has a spooky look or something,” she answered before she hopped down and ran off.
Life got busy and time moved on and once again I forgot about the doll. By then it was the spring of 2020 and the Coronavirus pandemic was starting to ratchet up in a way that had everyone on edge. I’d started having startlingly vivid stress dreams, my subconsciousness’s attempt to process all the chaos that was happening as the virus swept around the globe.
One night in April, when the kids were no longer in school due to the pandemic, it was predicted that we would have dangerous wind and ice storm, the kind that is not uncommon on the plains of the Midwest in the spring as the seasons fight to the death to see who will come out victorious. We’d been warned we could lose power and to stay indoors unless it was absolutely necessary. With the constant bubbling anxiety surrounding the pandemic as the baseline for our mood, this extra peril made us all extra restless. My husband paced back and forth, peeking out the windows, looking for god-knows-what. I tried to hide the edge in my voice and put a serene smile on my face for the kids. I don’t think it was working.
We could tell that the kids would have trouble going to bed, even though we still had power. They were feeding off the moaning sound of the wind outdoors and their parents’ jitters. I decided perhaps the best thing we could do was to play a few hands of gin rummy. During the pandemic we’d taken up the game to keep ourselves busy during lock down and the kids loved it.
Just as I grabbed the cards and invited the kids to the table, our power snapped off like someone dropping a thick black curtain. Now we were really scared. My kids reached out to me in the dark. I took a breath and told them everything would be fine (I’m such a liar). We would play cards by candlelight. I scrounged around for a few candles and my husband found a battery-operated radio we could listen to in case things got… weirder.
For two hours we sat together in the candlelight and played cards. After gin rummy it was crazy 8’s. Then UNO. And by this time I could see my kids bodies start to relax, their faces soften and their eyes grow heavy. It now was past midnight and I figured we probably wouldn’t get power back until morning so we started to shuffle the kids toward bed.
I stayed in the kitchen, cleaning up the cards and the cups and snacks and blowing out the candles. I could hear my husband cheerfully and sleepily tucking the kids into bed, first our middle daughter, then our son, our oldest. As he was finishing up in our son’s room, our youngest daughter, then the same age as when the doll came to me, wandered off toward her own room.
What happened next happened so fast I can barely recall beyond the blur of sounds and sights but from the second floor of our home came the sound of a scream. Not just a Saturday matinee slasher film scream but a piercing, slicing-flesh-from-bone howl of abject fear. Every amount of relaxation and peace that we had cultivated by those candlelit cards was burned to the ground in milliseconds as my youngest daughter wailed with all the strength of her little body. And, gasping for air, screamed again. And again. And again. Each echo reverberating with the same inexplicable horror as the one before it.
The sound was so incomprehensible, even I as a mother, accustomed to each whimper, groan and sob of my children, searched my brain for what could have caused this. The ideas that ran through my mind, heightened by the terror of the reality of the world in that moment, were too terrible, too fantastic, too supernatural and too disturbing to consider.
My husband on the other hand did not stop for a moment to consider what could be causing his daughter such distress and fearing the worst ran toward her room to see her standing in the doorway pointing a flashlight at my doll, sitting pretty, on the floor, propped up against the side of her dresser, silently watching. She had not played with the doll that day. She hadn’t seen it in weeks or even months and yet here she was, perfect curls and tiny little buckle shoes. Silent.
He did not recognize the doll, or at the very least, did not remember ever seeing it as I mostly kept it in the cedar chest and in an instant, adrenaline coursing through his heart, he grabbed the doll and flung it, out of her room and over the side of the railing in one heroic move.
Before I’d had the chance to run up the stairs or even ask what had happened, the doll came sailing through the air, blonde curls flowing behind her, arms outstretched like a cross and with the nauseating sound of crushing and cracking porcelain, landed face up in a menacing heap at my feet.
Her head was cracked in half, splitting down the middle between her eyes. The back of her head crushed like the shell on a hard boiled egg. Her arms and legs splayed out like a pile of kindling.
In one last terrifying moment, the doll had made her presence in the world known, no longer content to hide in a hope chest, sacrificing her whole self to see me, see my world one final time.
Something in me felt like the doll always knew what kind of an end she would come to. Something in her silent, expectant waiting and watching made me think she had a secret to hide.
I swept up her broken little body and slid it into a box. Days later I buried her in the backyard. My husband thought I was crazy for burying a toy doll but I felt that she needed to be treated with respect.
I think about her now and then, out in the garden, among the worms and dirt. Silent.
©2024, Amber Gustafson
Amber Gustafson is a mom of three from Ankeny, Iowa. She grew up on a farm in the southwest corner of the state and has a B.A. from Iowa State University and a MAC from Drake University. She is a member of Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism Honor Society, Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP). For more than a decade she has been a public advocate for the lives, health and safety of Iowans, running for Iowa Senate in 2018. You can read more of her work at Bleeding Heartland and The Des Moines Register and read more about her in The Washington Post. For interview and speaking requests, please email ambergus.iowa(at)gmail.com.