The girls filed into their chairs facing the demonstration
table with the old dollhouse at the head of the classroom. Only a patient
observer might have been able to distinguish one from another, a placement of a
freckle, some minor variations in height. They were indeed there, but it was
hard not to look at the stiff pleats of the skirts, the length of the tails of
their hair ribbons and the way each of them held their head with the same look
of detached attention that made it easy to dismiss them as a monolithic mass.
The headmistress entered the room several minutes after,
holding a golden birdcage with a small dove frantically beating its wings
against the bars. She set the cage on a high stool near the table. None of the
small eyes blinked or looked away when she reached in, grabbed the bird, ignoring
its small retaliatory pecks and the blood they drew, and twisted its neck over
the dollhouse.
“You may come up and observe now,” she said, placing the
lifeless bird back in the cage. The girls went up to the doll house with no
jostling or shoving and watched as new doll, a perfect image of a middle aged
man, complete with a poorly concealed bald spot, materialized in the house. An
eyeball about the height of new doll started rolling in its direction and
although the doll’s mouth opened, no scream came out as it ran from the room it
appeared in.
In the other rooms of the doll house, similar images presented
themselves with some dolls faring much better than others, but all of them
re-materializing again a few minutes after misfortune befell them, only to run
through the house again.
The headmistress finished tending to her small wounds and
motioned for the girls to return to their seats. She was about to turn to get
out her lesson plan for the day when she found she could not move at all. Anger
buzzed in her mind as she saw a small set of feet come towards her and felt a
small hand positioning her limbs until she was standing straight, hands
placed at her sides looking straight at one of her charges.
The girl held the broken dove in one hand, her index finger
on its bloody beak. “No Missus, you won’t be able to move. I’ve enough of your
blood here to be sure you aren’t going anywhere. I wouldn’t count on any of the
others. Even if they did know what to do, I’ve made sure to bind them good and
proper to their chairs. It didn’t take too much special to be sure of that.”
The girl turned the headmistress so she could see. They were
all sitting in their chairs facing the dollhouse.
“I am grateful to you Missus. I learned an awful lot from
you I never could have learned anywhere else. The magic, that was gift enough.
But I learned that knowledge doesn’t necessarily make one kind. I learned a lot
about my will and my pride, to make sure to never set myself up as the least or the best, so
I’d stay hidden in plain sight. I learned I could take the knowledge you gave,
and although it changed me a bit, it couldn’t change the core of me, if I didn’t
let it.”
The girl pulled a feather from the bird, stood on tiptoe to
touch it to the headmistress’s brow. Her body fell back on the floor.
The girl walked back to the cage, placing the bird’s body
back inside but still holding the feather. “I’ve learned to be a bit cruel,
though I’m not proud of it. At least I haven’t forgotten what I was like before
I learned it.”
She turned to face her former classmates. “You aren’t her. Not
yet. If you can cry just one honest tear, that’ll break the enchantment holding
you to the chairs and you can go your way. But I know it may take a while for
that, so until then you can watch the dollhouse.”
She turned the dollhouse on the table and moved it closer to
the other girls so they could see everything going on inside. Laying the
feather on top of the house she took one last look at her classroom and walked
out.
A doll, the perfect likeness of the headmistress, appeared
inside the house. And then she began to run.
