I’m writing and editing others’ writing for a play– a compilation of monologues on a theme. Here’s one I’ve written:
Dollface
by Megan Shank
Even now their faces haunt me: round and cotton, oval and porcelain, square and plastic, mean, cute, shrewd. Blue eyes, brown, stitched or stuck in, lashes, bare, lids and lidless. Button noses. Quiet smiles.
I return to that room.
Beside me, my twin brother’s small body, collapsed in a sweet-smelling bed lump, stirs. We would share this big green bed, sticking our gum to the back of its headboard, until we were 6, one year later. At that time, I would have a new tenant – the next brother down the line, eventually going through all four, each with their own particular sleeping dispositions.
When my twin brother and I shared this sleeping space, we promised one another to fall asleep at the exact same moment, only after we had selected our dreams from the foot of the chartreuse beast. We thought of picking out a dream as though it were like picking out a record from my parents’ boxes in the basement. Here was Mickey Mouse on ice skates, here were snow days and a Christmas puppy.
Tonight, however, my brother had left me in the conscious world alone for the first time. Unmitigated by human contact, the night proved clear and calm. I traced letters and words on the green dresser that bordered the bed. M-E-G-A-N. That was me. And here I was. Here I was. There was something lonely and powerful about that.
I stood upon the bed. Surveying the room, my things were in their right place. Atop the dresser sat Raggedy Ann and Andy, dolls my Grandmother had passed on to me, still smelling of stale cigarettes. Their stitched smiles and impossibly curvy dimples shined under the light of the lamp I had since learned not to touch. It had already burned me a dozen times, but as a child, I greatly enjoyed the game of touch-it-as-fast-as-you-can. Was it possible to do so without scalding tiny fingers? Could I, through the acuity of my own physical judgment, beat what could hurt me?
I found I could not. Born with a non-cancerous tumor on my face – a cherry lump of flesh the size of a healthy pea that hunched like a tired dancer upon the tip of my nose—I learned quickly it was impossible to escape some hurts. My kindergarten classmates called me Rudolph. The word freak had apparently not yet entered their vocabulary. I found comfort in the company of my twin brother, an intensely shy child who never uttered harm. Or much else.
I looked at the tacit Raggedy Ann and Andy. I hated that I couldn’t brush their hair – loops of turned red thread bound tight to flat skulls. Also, their shoes were irremovable. You could strip Andy and Ann right on down to their androgynous little naked selves, and they’d still be wearing those damn shoes. This was hard to accept. I could see my other toys stacked in the corner of the room. In the forefront, barely touched by the light stood my doll Annie – apparently I wasn’t so creative with names yet – her hair made punk rock stand-up-on-end straight through my years of toting her affectionately by the scalp and my stuffed rooster Pock-a-bird, named thus after his felt beak had “pocked” me in the eye when I was three. I had hated him for weeks before giving him a last minute reprieve prior to a Goodwill swap run. Years later my poodle, Bingo “Peter Venkman” Shank, would chew off his offending beak.
What were these things to me, and what was my relationship to them alone in the dark? I leapt from the bed and seized a colored marker from the desk. Scrambling back up to the dresser, I snatched up Ann.
The first few bold black strokes barely gave me pause. After marking the first two letters of my first name in blocky capital letters on Ann’s flat white forehead, “M-E,” I hesitated, astounded by a newly discovered significance. But “M-E” wasn’t the biggest part of it. I finished “G-A-N.” In the burning lamplight, the dolls and toys stared at me with blankly benevolent eyes. No mouth pursed in consternation, no eyebrows furrowed. Satisfied with my work on Ann, I moved on to Andy, then Annie, then Pock-a-bird and the others until my toys lay in a brutal pile upon the bed like victims of a mass execution. Just as tragically, no one had noticed.
There was no danger my brothers would take these things. I did not have to claim them in this way. And yet, beyond reason or incitement, I had cradled each with loving care as I disfigured their faces, one by one with the muted seriousness of which only children are capable.
The thrill of the decision, the satisfying immediacy of the work drained and the sharpness of the night faded in the shadow of awful implications. This could not be undone. Neither time nor twin could fix this. It wouldn’t be gone after I joined him in the green behemoth bed and slumbered. I realized for the first time the awful might of my own actions, the terrible power of me. They, like me, were marked. I discovered I had “me,” but I wasn’t sure what it meant when everything else was involved. My brother slept. I buried my face in the faces of those that bore my name and tried to forget to forget myself.
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