By Annabel Moir Smith
While I am on the bus I get these texts from my mother:
Hi my darling, I’m cleaning out toy room in basement
Polly is there. Clothes. Bed. Accessories etc.
I know you were talking about donating her, but before I go ahead and do it, I want to confirm it’s ok with you
It’s hard to let your childhood go!
I respond:
yes of course! I’d love for someone new to have her
Within minutes she sends me a picture of Polly’s clothes packed neatly in a little box, and Polly, sealed in a clear plastic bag like a funereal shroud.
I reply with a thumbs up.
When I was a little girl Polly used to talk back to me. She didn’t like anything I did or said. When I tried to dress her she would complain that her clothes were itchy and I had no fashion sense.
I tucked her in every night. “Good night,” I would say, “I love you.” Polly would shrink under her covers and say, “No you don’t. You’re just saying that.”
Either I was neglecting her or I was smothering her. I didn’t know what to do.
We slept in my bed together only once. I was sad and so I needed her. I woke up in the middle of the night, nightmare-primed, and there she was, upright on the floor and out of my reach.
Eventually I got too old for Polly, as we all do, and I put all of her clothes and her bed and her accessories into a big black trash bag and laid her down gently beside it in our basement. That shut her up. There was nothing she could say anymore. I hoped she knew now that she should have shown a little gratitude when she had the chance.
None of this is true, by the way. Of course it isn’t.
I just wanted something. I wanted her words to work in tandem with my words. I think I wanted that from everyone, then. But Polly had no words, and so I gave her the ones I felt I should get accustomed to hearing.
By mid-afternoon Polly is gone. Someone else’s creature of pliant, errant nature. Mom says she dropped her off in a bag at Goodwill and now all we can do is hope she goes to a good home. I fancy I can hear her calling out to me, needing me for once. But then again, I fancy a lot of things.
Annabel Moir Smith is a student and writer from Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. She currently studies English Literature at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.Her fiction has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Bending Genres, Bright Flash, Literally Stories, Eunoia Review, Apricity Magazine, and others.
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