Writer Unblocked

A Doll’s Life

Cynthia felt the cold weight of the keys in her hand, her blonde hair blowing in the brisk autumn breeze. It felt like a dream. Her new house! A six bedroomed detached Victorian villa, her inheritance money well spent. A new start in red brick, windows winking at her conspiratorially as she walked slowly up the garden path.

A fresh chapter in the novel of life. And a place to hide from the past.

The house was beautiful, but old, its Victorian décor little changed over the years. Cynthia explored it inside and out, every cupboard, every dish, every picture still on the wall. The house had lived in its own bubble, little changed by the tracks of time. It was now her very own project. She grinned. This place made up for her empty grief and her many wrong directions, mistakes appearing as early wrinkles on her face.

Cynthia found it in the attic, behind a pile of boxes. An exquisite Victorian doll’s house, with tiny Victorian furniture. It was beautiful. Cynthia smiled, properly, for the first time in months, as she closed and then reopened the curtains on its tiny windows.

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That night, sleep claimed her like an old friend, as she drifted deeper and deeper. She dreamt she was in the doll’s house, a tiny doll sitting in a tiny chair. She woke up, a smile fingering her face. What a strange dream. Would she keep the doll’s house or would she sell it? It must be worth something.

She climbed drowsily out of bed, her feet touching the cold wooden floor. Wooden floor? The house was carpeted. Cynthia looked down at the floor, perplexed. Then she looked around, as horror hissed in her heart. She was in the doll’s house. She was tiny. She was a doll.

This must be a dream, a dream within a dream.

But she did not wake up. She wandered the doll’s house, fingering the furniture, running up the stairs, screaming. But still Cynthia did not wake up.

Tears stung her eyes as a shadow moved behind her. In alarm, she turned round. “Hello, I’ve been waiting for a friend.” It was a girl in Victorian attire, a long blue dress and blonde ringlet hair. “I am Anne.”

Anne showed Cynthia round the doll’s house. “This can be your bedroom,” she remarked in one of the rooms. “It is, after all, where you appeared last night. I watched you, sleeping. I could not believe it. A new companion.”

Anne lived in the year 1870 in the main house, until one day she awoke in the doll’s house, just like Cynthia today. “I keep thinking I am here because I made a mistake,” confided Anne. “There is a portrait of me in the dining room, crumpling up a love letter. It is a real memory – for posterity in paint. Am I here as a punishment?”

Days passed. Cynthia had learned to live with Anne, her stories and her whining. She no longer needed to eat, the little doll’s body alive all by itself.

And she still did not wake up.

One day they entered the dining room to pretend to eat. In a corner, completely out of place, stood a large old-fashioned TV on a stand; but still ahead of its time in this house. “That’s new!” gasped Anne.

Cynthia tentatively pressed the on button, to be confronted by a black and white picture of herself! Massively failing to impress at a job interview. She remembered it. The dream job, and nerves nailed her interview coffin with a huge “Rejection” etched on top.

She put out her hand, touching the screen. Then she was there. In the interview. Back in the past. And most importantly, out of the doll’s house.

The shock turned her interview answers to sharp, witty anecdotes. She had already failed this interview, she could not fail again. They did not wait to phone her. She got the job on the spot.

Cynthia left the interview room, smiling. To her dismay, Anne was standing outside the building. “I followed you in to the picture box. What year are we in? Everything is so strange?”

Cynthia pursed her lips; she was five years in her past, but Anne was over 100 hundred years in her future. What to do? She showed Anne round the town, explaining cars, describing modern day life. Then they were there, at the house. There was a sign outside. “Room to Let.”

As if in a dream, they knocked on the door. A young man answered, a towel round his shoulder. “This is a student house mainly. We have a bedroom to rent. It has two beds. Perfect for you both.”

Silently, Cynthia and Anne entered the house. It was a lived-in mess. Cynthia peered nervously at the TV in the dining room, a modern TV this time. Then they slowly crept upstairs.

This must be a dream, a dream within a dream. But as Cynthia’s fake smile turned to a frown, she did not think so. She stared absently round the empty bedroom, and as if in a dream, murmured quietly, “We’ll take it.”

Above them, in the attic, a doll’s house sat silent. Waiting.