by Vivian Sheperis
After that day I never played with dolls again. It happened in my tenth year on the seventh step in the middle of my fantasy, halfway up the attic staircase. A baby doll lay on each of the steps.
The staircase hugged the right side of the parlor wall. It was guarded on the left with an iron railing with fanciful designs. I saw this as a hospital, each stair a private room for a sick child. I was their nurse.
There were seven dolls, each a present from Santa. But just before this last December, I realized Santa was really Mom and Dad. The doll’s status dropped a few notches, and my pituitary gland was foreshadowing big changes.
On this sunny but cool day in late summer, I carried the seven dolls from their shelf in my closet to the parlor staircase. I placed one doll on the third step and the rest in succession up to the ninth. The fifth step held an imaginary bed of cool sheets for the largest, and I lay her on her back. On the sixth was a crib for the smallest baby swaddled in a pink blanket. Each child had an ailment for which only I had the cure. I knew everyone’s pain and gently touched the sore place. All were sleeping, breathing calmly, and their nurse dressed in white sat down to rest. I kept my vigil, eyes roving from one child to the next.
More quickly than I would have wished, an extraordinary wave of magical energy rose from the scene, lifted to the ceiling and disappeared through the attic door.
Rigid, I sat and stared at seven wooden stairs with seven plastic dolls. Their breathing had stopped. Their eyes were shut tight by crusty hinges. Hard limbs were frozen like the dead in Pompeii. I looked down at my blue overalls, and scruffy brown oxfords.
I didn’t stay long after the shift. There was nothing more to do there. I gathered the seven bodies in my arms and carried them back to their corner of the closet. They lay buried in the dark for a years or so until Mother did some spring-cleaning. I don’t know what their ultimate fate was, for I never sought their company again.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a woman, I put away childish things.” And that was a loss I always remember.