Ai Jiang's Smol Tales From Between Worlds by Ai Jiang

Author:Ai Jiang [Ai Jiang]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tales From Between
Published: 2023-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

The second coffin was found in the basement of a condo set for demolition in Manhattan. Its waterlogged wood was consumed by murky mold from prolonged exposure to moisture and a lack of sun. The second doll was missing her legs. Her ginger hair sat in a messy topknot with her yellow cotton dress, embroidered with sunflowers, soiled beneath the hips. The doll's eyes were intact, but they looked tired, weary, defeated, with oval indents of purple weighing down the lower lids.

Second Doll's husband was a joy, on the outside, with a cigarette in one hand and the palm of his other digging into the small of her back at his annual company party. Her bright gold dress cost more than half her salary working parttime at the grocers as a cashier, but her husband forced her to buy it anyhow—a new one each year. The husband didn't want Second Doll to work full time and certainly didn't allow her to wear the makeup she had on now to work.

"There's no need… especially for a job like that," he had said.

Second Doll stayed. And she smiled. And she blinked back liquid pain that burnt the lower lids of her eyes, lining them red.

What else could she have done?

Her parents loved him, her friends loved him, she… loved him? Didn't she?

Yes, of course she did—does. There would be no one else more suitable, her parents had said, and she was running out of time. No one wanted a withered flower whose petals had begun falling. She was already twenty-five—the same age her mother had given birth to her. Yes. Second Doll needed him.

Second Doll didn't attend the next annual company party. Her husband didn't want her wearing a maternity dress; he wanted her to stay home: "It's better this way. You need rest, don't you?"

She caressed her growing belly and leaned back against the headboard of the bed, her legs elevated on pillows. Second Doll watched The Great Gatsby for the eighth time that month, knowing but denying that under similar dazzling lights of Gatsby's ball, her husband would be drinking wine with a woman not named Myrtle—but might as well have been.

"My love," Second Doll said in the French words her husband loved to hear from her lips before they married. He hung up after quickly telling her he was busy.

Did she want her baby to live with such violence?

I ripped the Second Doll's MISSING poster down from where it was posted on the chaotic announcement bulletin in the abandoned condo's lobby, the paper curling at the edges with a few phone number tabs pulled off. 212-XXX-XXXX. With the poster folded in halves, I put it inside my pocket. Was the phone number that of a family member, a relative, her husband, or maybe a casual lover who found themselves far too deep to leave, a Gatsby, or maybe someone like me?

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