The Room of Dolls

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As my family began packing away Christmas decorations in light of the New Year, I entered my living room to find an old American girl doll box. Peeking through the plastic was not the red headed Felicity as the box label read, but rather the molded clay head of Santa Claus.

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As we locked eyes in a staring contest in which I would always lose and perhaps become cursed from, I remembered something from my distant past. 

From my birth to my childhood days, my maternal grandparents didn’t live near me, as they do now, but in a large house in Raleigh, North Carolina. Every summer my family would drive two days down towards the coast, spending a few nights with Grandma and Grandpa before heading towards Atlantic Beach. Grandma and Grandpa’s house was fun, for many reasons. The house had a grand staircase that my brother and I would drop beanie babies off of (once this resulted in shattering the humble abode of an innocent potted plant). The house had long hallways and multiple spare rooms where we ran, laughed, and tossed more beanie babies. There were beanie babies everywhere. Wait, I’m getting sidetracked. The memory that gripped me as I locked eyes with the sunken Santa head was a specific spare room in the house.

Now, I never once remember thinking this was creepy as a child. But if my memory of the room serves me right, it looked like this:

In the middle of the room, just carpet. The sides of the room contained desk after shelf after desk after shelf. Many of these surfaces contained spool thread racks. Some of these racks contained thread. However, on most of them, mounted in rows of empty, glassy eyes: clay head after clay head, each in a different stage of production. 

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The most horrific detail of this memory is that the only reason I have these 360 degree recollection of the room is I used to go in there, leave the lights off, and just lay in the empty center of the room, meeting all the pairs of eyes, or eye sockets, around me…

My grandma is still a fan of those molded elves or reindeer that plug into the wall and sway back and forth.

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…it gives me the chills.

My prompt for you today is the following…

Write a poem titled “The Room of Dolls.” It doesn’t have to include any details from the room I described; what do you see when you picture a room of dolls? What are you memories surrounding dolls? Sweet, comforting? Something inanimate you swear saw blinking?

Ugh. Merry Belated Krampus to all. And to all a night with no melting doll face nightmares. 

Read more of Alyssa's mostly non-creepy-doll-related work on Floodmark.