Christopher - Variations on a Toy Cemetery
Dec 26, 2015 21:27:12 GMT -8
Post by Thy Dungyeon Maestyr on Dec 26, 2015 21:27:12 GMT -8
Variations on a Toy Cemetery:
How Do You Die?
How Do You Die?
(Trigger Warnings: Mental Illness, Suicide, Fire)
This story is part of a spontaneous project to get out of the holiday spirit, and might be joined by another variation on the title. The idea was to take some text or an image from an old horror novel cover and write a story to fit it. I don't know anything of the contents of the original novel "Toy Cemetery," so presumably (and hopefully) this is quite different.
***
Morning sun after pre-dawn rain. The slightly crumbled wet black asphalt ribbon snaked around gentle hills thick with puffy rain-sparkled evergreens and soggy brown mid-fall deciduous trees sloughing their miserable foliage into mud and gravel at the roadside. Downhill the trees rapidly thinned to nothing and industrial yards, uphill they sequestered family homes from each other in closed lots of bright green grass and pebble slick mushrooms.
Up a gravel lane through a low mostly decorative wooden fence, in one of those lots where a residence should have been, a small cheap old building held nothing but locked and darkened offices. Beyond it, the few acres were mowed flat and dotted with very small tombstones - none more than a few feet tall and most were inches. They were too close together to be accommodating human remains beneath.
The gate hung open on its hinge, locking mechanism easily smashed out of the soft wood. A boxy old Honda Civic sat rudely askew in the drive, hatch wide open. A woman clambered out of the back, pausing to readjust every few seconds, until her feet touched gravel and the last of the car's contents were dragged onto the ground. Several large red plastic gas cans full and heavy, one bottle of lighter fluid, and a black garbage bag filled with dry crumpled newspaper.
She was in early middle age with crudely home-chopped silver and black hair, chestnut color skin, weary dark eyes hiding in bulging capsules of lid. Her small stature made the economy car look mid-sized. She wrinkled her lips and fished in the pockets of her huge beige and brown sweater jacket, coming out with a small shiny pistol. She turned it over in her hands and put it away, then laboriously hauled the first can around the building.
The business opened at ten AM. Plenty of time to get this done.
***
Some days before that, a phone call.
"...It took a lot of years for me to get past those feelings, a lot of different ways of coping. Or maybe not so much coping as denying? Rejecting? Rejecting. My first therapist - I mean the first one that mattered - she wanted me to break the chain of thoughts. She laid the groundwork - the stuff that I could use every day, like limiting exposure to triggers, leaving the building, counting backwards, making sure that no one I know would give me presents--"
"No presents, like nothing? Not just dolls and stuffed animals?"
"Yeah, nothing. It was safer that way - no judgment calls for the gift givers, no elaborate rules to keep in mind. You try explaining to a grandma what 'easily anthropomorphized or overly precious' means. Anyway, it was easy to stop people from giving me gifts because I was such a mess that no one wanted to be friends with me."
"Aww."
"I don't need that, not right now. I just need you to understand the damage that you do, and put an end to it."
"I can't do that..."
***
Dinah looked out over the miniature headstones, feeling a little like Godzilla inhaling before a breath of radioactive fire. She smiled and dragged the gas can over wet slippery grass to the back of the lot where shrubs were held at bay with regular pruning. She started pouring the gas can into the grass, awkwardly at first but more easily as the load emptied into the lot.
As she reached the first of the headstones, she winced and kept on. The words on the memorials threatened to invade her mind but she batted them down with practiced skill. Beloved. No. Precious. No. Special. No. Very. No. Forever. Never. She blurred her vision by squinting, turned her head away from those with sculptures and images. Only a third of the way through the stones, she ran out of gas and went back for more.
Her back ached badly before she was done with the yard alone, so she took a break in front of the building to eat a few slices of summer sausage and cheddar cheese. Everything smelled and tasted of gasoline. She chased the food with two illegally obtained hydrocodone and a half-thermos of luke-warm black coffee. She swished it in her mouth to break up the remaining grease from the food, swallowed, then went back to work.
***
"...I can't do that. Just because one unfortunate girl is fixated on toys like that doesn't mean that anyone else will ever be, and other people can get a lot of good out of it, and most of all because if it hadn't been toys, it could've been anything else. Should bakers stop baking bread because some people have eating disorders?"
"Toys aren't just anything. It couldn't have been just anything. They're inanimate physical objects, they have weight, they take up space - so much space. And you're compelled by society to preserve them. It's not what they are, I told you I can be triggered by a coke can with Santa Claus on it. It's the implied soul, the way books and cartoons and movies and commercials always think it's so cute to imply these things have a hidden life, that they're winking when you turn your back, that they can care and feel loss and sadness when they're discarded..."
***
She was back in the yard again, arranging a trail of newspaper splashed with lighter fluid to help kindle the coming blaze, when the visions began. The gas fumes were all around. The opiates in her blood quelled headache but did nothing for the nausea, dizziness, and -evidently- the hallucination.
First Dinah heard tinkling faerie voices talking indistinctly, then she saw a wagon train of tiny plastic and metal cars racing over the grass. They disappeared behind a headstone. Her heart jumped, the world wheeled around her, and she fell in the slimy reeking grass - two small stone crosses digging hard into her back.
She stared at the bright sky, painful as it was, to avoid whatever she was imagining moving around her. "Hehehe, no one is gonna remember you anymore. I'm gonna burn you out of the world."
Something laughed back at her, she blinked away the stars, and lurched to her feet. Trail of papers, spritz with the fluid. This was the fuse, this was the easy part.
When the dolls began to watch, she looked away from them.
***
"...It was a boyfriend I had for a few weeks, the last one ever, who helped me learn to hate them. To think of them as an obligation others want to impose on me, that the toy is the embodiment of someone else's imposition - a request I can reject, something I can say no to, with the strength of hate behind my refusal. The fact I have to do that - to hate and refuse and spend so much time turning away from the impositions - it tells me that it isn't just me, that world is saturated in these bad messages, about toys specifically.
I know this isn't just me. I've talked to people, and they agree with me up to the point where it starts to impact my adult life - which is when they start looking at me like I'm crazy. But before they know that about me, they agree completely. When we are children, we are more sensitive to these messages, and they hurt us."
"Messages. Like it's some kind of conspiracy to hurt children..."
***
The air was thick and and wet with fumes, but not as bad in front of the house. Still bad enough for the hallucinations to follow partway. Dinah couldn't see their faces clearly as they watched her from the side of the little house, peering around the corner.
She sat on the hood of the Civic, knees tucked up to her chest, hands in her pockets. It wasn't quite close to ten, but what if that Kessler woman came in very early? Not like she has much else to do with her time, being some kind of retiree.
In her left hand she felt the lighter, in her right hand she felt the gun. The gun was for waving at anyone who tried to stop her, that's what she told herself when she made the plans.
But the sense it made was strong. Everyone knew she was a crazy woman with weird feelings about toys. It would be perfect for them, make the kind of sense which allows them to go about their lives with ease, to find her dead at the toy cemetery.
***
"...There doesn't have to be a conspiracy for an idea to become part of a culture. Maybe some nineteenth century pedophile author thought dancing toys leading children on magical adventures was just a cute idea, and someone else read that and forgot about the source of their inspiration and did a similar story, and so on, until there's a million stories in the same vein. And then later on some creeps realize it's a good angle to sell toys, and it spreads to all other media. And you see in that, no one ever intended to hurt children. It's an unintended consequence, and one people don't think about or even care if they notice."
***
It wasn't quite close to ten and a woman shot herself in the mouth - devastating her brain stem - and died instantly. The muzzle flash sparked in the fluids she was drenched in and a tongue of flame raced across her body, leapt to the newspaper on the ground, followed the trail of paper to the house and its yard. The small house began to burn from the base, its yard became orange burning acres pouring a column of black smoke into the sky, like a portal to hell.
***
"You've done a lot of talking here and I hear you, I get that you've had a lot of pain. But I don't believe that sentimentality about toys is bad for the rest of us, I really don't. And even if I did, think about this. I own a toy cemetery. It's about letting go of toys in a healthy way, and doubles as a way to learn about dealing with death and loss in a safe environment. Teaching people to let go of toys would be helpful for those who feel too emotionally fraught about their preservation, would it not? I don't understand why you, of all people, would want me to close my business."
"I've told you. I've been telling you. You're part of the system that makes the problem in the first place - the people who are promoting the idea we should feel any sense of obligation at all for material things. Please, try to understand me."
"We're going to have to agree to disagree. Please do not call me again."
***
Dinah remembered a moment from years before in a gas station bathroom stall, looking at her hands to avoid looking at the coat hook. She could still see it in her peripheral vision, a face like Beaker from the Muppets - long nose, bulging screws for eyes, life in a state eternal distress.
Then she opened her eyes on a world like a sunny English garden, twisting fantastic trees tracing leafy fingers through endless slow breeze, plastic sculptures in bright primary colors everywhere instead of flowers. Dolls and stuffed animals and stranger toys stood around her in a circle with wide, artificially expressive eyes. They flinched as she sat up, but didn't run away.
"What the hell?"
One of the Cabbage Patch Kids in attendance stepped forward shyly, offering a little bow. "I am Robert Allen. What kind of toy are you?" It spoke with its mind in a child's voice, its plastic face unmoving.
She turned around and buried her face in the grass, shaking all over. "They were real. They were always real."
"Are you OK? Do you need something?"
Dinah screamed into the dirt for minutes before she was able to say anything else. When she regained her composure, she was surrounded by an audience of thousands.
Robert Allen was still in the front row. "What's your name?"
"I'm Dinah. So am I in toy heaven? Is this forever?"
"Hello Dinah. I don't know what you mean."
"This place. Is it an afterlife for toys? Were you all buried or lost?"
"Oh! Yes. It's very fun."
"So it is forever?"
A small coterie of barbies approached her carefully and jumped back at a casual sweep of her hand. Robert Allen said, "What does that mean?"
She checked herself. She didn't have an exit wound in the back of her head. She was breathing, her heart was beating. "It means... Will I live here forever? Do you live forever?"
"Oh! Um, no. Everyone goes away."
"How do you die? How will I die?"
The lead Barbie said, "This world is a mirror. When we were alive, we grew more scratched and hurt until we were gone." Another one put up a stiff hand and added, "In this world, our scratches go away and we get more shiny and clean, until..."
Robert Allen finished, "We come apart. After that, sometimes we're buried. Sometimes a Bob the Builder makes us into houses and things."
A Bob the Builder with one arm popped out of the crowd to ask, "What are you made of?"
Forty two years later, Dinah disappeared forever.
***