Thursday, 16 August 2012

• Like A Porcelain Doll (+ a poem)

  Like A Porcelain China Doll 10:02PM – 10:34PM

   

  Claudia sat in the middle of her playroom; her black skirt bloomed around her like the skirt around a Christmas tree. In her hands she held a nude, porcelain doll with smooth lumps for breasts and no definable genitalia to speak of. A man in a hooded black robe walked up behind her.

  “Why am I not like this doll?” Claudia asked him raising the doll in question up into the light for further scrutiny.

  “The doll is merely an image of beauty, my child, she could never compare to the real thing.”

  Claudia looked up over her shoulder at him. She could not discern his face inside the empty darkness of his hood.

  “You speak insincerely. I do not like it.”

  He placed a hand upon Claudia’s shoulder. The fingers were long and bone white, yet perfectly smooth like the skin of the porcelain doll.

  “I did not mean to be insincere, my pet, only that you care too much about beauty for one so young. Worry will make you age much quicker, you know.”

  Claudia was barely listening, her attention had all ready returned to the perfectly sculpted figurine.

  “Is a woman’s natural image not perfect enough for the artist? Is that why he must turn her into lumps and shapes? It’s dehumanizing.”

  “What is your fascination with this doll?” the man asked, plucking it from Claudia’s grasp.

  She watched the doll’s every movement with envious eyes.

  “I want to be her.”

  “Impossible,” he scoffed, “You were not constructed out of clay. Besides, why would you want to be something so fragile?” he said and tossed the doll onto the wooden floor.

  Claudia cringed as the doll’s body struck the hard wood and cracked. Her head severed at the neck and each of her limbs broke at the joint. Claudia scrambled over the open floor to the doll’s side like an EMT to a cardiac arrest patient. She beheld the damage with her eyes and her arms flung wide, as if she were to scoop up the pieces they would magically mend themselves.

  “Look what you’ve done!” she cried turning her antagonistic azure glare upon the man in the black robe. “You’ve destroyed her!”

  “I’ve destroyed a perception only, love. You are still intact, but your idea of beauty is not.” He spoke with his hands clasped together at the front of his robes.

  “I want her! Fix her!” Claudia demanded petulantly.

  The man in the robe shook his head. “No, you will only spend hours brooding over her perfection. I have much bigger plans for you, my child.”

  Claudia rose to her feet and began to beat upon his forearms with her curled fists. His fingers circled her wrists entirely and pulled her arms apart. He crouched down so that they were at eye-level even though she saw nothing inside his hood.

  “You are all ready perfect, love, like a china-doll yourself. Don’t you see?” He said releasing her wrists and conjuring a circular mirror from the confines of his robe. Claudia stood transfixed before the mirror, her arms still held up by their own volition at ninety-degree angles. Slowly they fell to her sides as she became enraptures with the mirror. As soon as she was obsessed with her reflection he took the mirror away and hid it in his pocket. Claudia blinked the daze away.

  “Vanity is not an endearing quality, love, you see yourself in everything – the doll, the mirror—you are helplessly hopeless against your own image.”

  Claudia’s face darkened like a storm cloud passing over the sun. “And you are ashamed of the monster you are which is why you hide inside your cloak and never allow anyone to see your face!”

  “We all have our flaws, love.” He said rising and gazing down at the broken doll. “She’s perfect now; broken just like you.”

  Claudia screamed and kicked the pieces of the broken doll to the four corners of the room. As she turned back to unleash her fury on her father she discovered he was gone.

   

   

  10:35PM

  Staring at the wreckage of your face

  I realized that all my idols are porcelain;

  Everything I cherish is a china cherub

  Easily shattered upon the hard-wood floor,

  All that I adore is only an adornment

  Upon the crown of beauty a prince wears,

  And my prince, that dark master of shadows,

  Wears his figments well; an homage to my imagination

  As clever as he is I am far more creative

  His cunning has nothing on my craft

  For I am the mother who birthed him,

  Yet he is the one I call “Father”

  Not without a hint of reverence for his holy name

  He is an image in my mirror of which I fear

  But the scariest moments are when he’s not there beside me

  For I have come to depend solely upon his presence

  To make my soul feel whole

  Though his visage is vapid and his eyes empty

  I could never be in love with another devil

  For only his wicked ways will assuage me.

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