Owlish by Dorothy Tse

Author:Dorothy Tse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

It started to drizzle and never seemed to stop.

Spring in Nevers was quiet but brazen. It forced its way through walls, invading each and every household. Trails of green and white mildew grew to engulf wooden chairs and table legs, clambering into wardrobes and infesting leather overcoats that lurked at the back. Lurid yellow mushrooms sprouted from bus seats. Silent life forms burst forth in all kinds of new shapes and colours, and those trapped inside the church were no exception.

Let’s rewind a little, to the evening Professor Q last left the church. As the door closed behind him, the lid of the antique music box began to creak open, pushed from the inside. Aliss’s hands reached through the ensuing gap, her luminous white, barely parted fingers flexing like worms awakening from hibernation. Then came her glassy, colour-changing eyes, reopening as she became upright, slowly bringing the world around her into focus.

The church was dim, the only light coming from Professor Q’s neglected desk lamp, which illuminated the desk and the book that lay open on top of it. The white rocking horse and the painting Aliss had seen while riding it were both submerged in shadow. Aliss still had a vague memory of the painting; she could conjure the scene. She crept out of the music box on all fours, like a cat (although highly skilled as a ballerina doll, she still needed some time to adjust to walking). She climbed shakily onto the two-seater desk chair and shifted around in search of a comfortable position, discovering that her spine fitted perfectly into the moulded back of the chair. She looked to her right and saw the presence that usually occupied the space beside her was gone. It didn’t matter: she knew how to use her tiny fingers with their minuscule fingernails to turn the book’s pages herself.

In the yellow glow of the lamp, Aliss stroked the pages, enjoying the sensation of lamp-warmed words and paper against her palms. Gradually, however, she began to feel unnerved by the shadows drifting around her. After some groping about, she located a switch that turned on all the other lights in the church.

The first thing she saw, inside the opened music box, was a small, leather-bound book with the handwritten title: User Manual. It was full of diagrams with handwritten captions, explaining the many positions a user could expect from their ballerina doll.

Aliss was not particularly interested, and began to explore the rest of the church. There were bookcases everywhere crammed with books; she remembered reading some of them with the man who was always coming to visit. They hadn’t made much sense to her at the time, but they were certainly more fun than the user manual.

She followed a bookshelf until she reached the three-way mirror, where she sat down and saw her own face not once, but three times. Three times, but not at the same time; she had to choose. Whenever she turned, something vanished. She tried to touch

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