“Have I ever told you that I hate this time of year?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Rue swings her feet, kicking at the air; a tiny dinosaur and a harried zombie meander along the street three stories below. “You do?”
Arlene hums in reply, and glares at a giggling mass of sexy fruits. A bare-chested nurse runs after them, abs glistening in the fading light. “It’s just so surface.”
Her hands are always the same, soft and firm as old well-worn leather and covered with fine traceries of scars. Some of the scars you recognize—the finger she almost lost slicing onions when she laughed too hard at one of your jokes, the scattered dots where bees objected to her plucking a chunk of honeycomb, the shiny burn-scars on her fingertips that she’d had to beg your help with. Most of them you do not. She was already ancient when you first met.
“The strangest thing,” Carol will say, afterwards, “was that I knew it was right. It was—have you ever seen someone do something, and known it was wrong, without even having to think about it?”
“Of course,” the interrogator will say, “like a wild animal mauling someone.”
“Exactly! But,” she’ll reply, “no, you don’t get it. It—it looked like that, sure. But it was right to do it. It was doing what was best for both of us, for everyone.”
Sticky-sweet doll-guts ooze out through the cracks in her teeth as she chews, mouth grinding in ceaseless motion. She’s a messy eater, our monster is, and her meal drips down to stain her ample chest and her temporary cell’s clean tile floor. By the time she’s done ruined dollstuff puddles around her feet and the poor broken thing’s porcelain shell is stretched as open as we’ve ever seen a doll’s corpse.