#the surreality of seeing a reflection of oneself in a hoarder

[brumeraven]

🍂: Resurrection || burnout, chronic illness, creativity, decay, depression, disability, expectations, fae, gross, dolls, psychopomps?, love?, the surreality of seeing a reflection of oneself in a hoarder

"it will take care of that, Miss."

Before the thought that I might as well be finished eating had even fully formed, the doll's fine porcelain fingers clamped on an equally fine porcelain plate one shade further from bone white, whisking it away from the table before me.

Presumptuous? Perhaps. But the doll was always right. I was done, the last fifteen minutes spent pushing bits of vegetable into sorted piles and tracing designs in the sauce.

All that brumeraven work disappeared along with a meal half-eaten at best on a plate...not quite normal?

"Where'd you find this plate?"

"the cupboard, Miss." It never was easy differentiate snark from honest confusion with this one.

"The edges. The rim is rolled. My plates have a rim that thins towards the edge, no?"

"the manufacturer changed its process. this one apologizes."

I thought nothing about it at the time, assumed that one had simply broken and the doll had tried to replace it without my finding out. These things happened from time to time; dolls hated change almost as much as they hated admitting culpability.

Then I threw out some paper.

I was writing again. Or, rather, I wasn't writing again, just staring at a few half-written words on a page.

With a frown and a flourish for none but myself, I plunged pen into inkwell and hovered over the paper in anticipation, willing anything at all to manifest on the page.

A splotch was the only answer to my prayers, dripped carelessly from nib I'd forgotten to tap then held in trembling hand. The iron gall ink darkened to black along with my mood, eating away at the paper until only a hole remained.

Crumpled and tossed in anger across the room.

"it will take care of that, Miss."

As always, the doll I'd forgotten was there was quick to act, scooping the balled-up scrap of failure off the floor with near-reverential care and turning as if to hurry from the room with it.

"Flatten that out first! It takes up too much space in the bin if it's crumpled. I'll not have you overflowing the trash."

My anger was as undirected as my scribbles. The doll stopped all the same and swiveled to look at me, shuddering slightly in a manner I took as quizzical.

"this one cannot."

I blinked, not understanding the flat refusal. "What do you mean you can't? You're not capable of flattening a sheet of paper?"

"it cannot destroy nor change what Miss has created..."

"It's trash. It's going to be destroyed anyways when it gets thrown out."

Quaking now, joints quivering with... Fury? Or shock?

I decided on the latter; I'd unintentionally committed some great blasphemy for what seemed the hundredth time.

"What are you going to do with that?"

"this one will file it, of course."

"Show me."

Words I would regret.

It lead the way, and I shuffled along after as fast as my failing legs would allow.

It wasn't far, just down to the exterior basement. I hadn't been in years, not since the trip out and around the side of the house and down the steep stairs had become all but impossible for me.

Still, it wasn't large, just a tiny cellar I'd never used for much. I pointed at the door, finger crooked yet still firm and unwavering in its demand, and the doll stepped forward to push it open.

I'm not sure what I expected to find.

Dolls are creatures of Flux, animated by it, and consequently have some limited capacity to influence their world. The exact nature of this interaction has been a productive topic for the philosophists, much scholarly debate with little actual scholarly consensus.

No doll has ever been capable of wielding Flux with any conscious control or precision, and yet...the subconscious wishes and needs of such simple creatures sometimes manifest in ways that would've been deemed impossible by even the most forceful Witch.

The basement was changed, different, massive. Certainly bigger than the footprint of the house at this point and with no indication that it had been dug out or otherwise enlarged.

It had simply...expanded to the doll's needs, without regard for the constraints of physical space.

The entirety was filled floor to near-ceiling with boxes in a hundred different sizes, piled haphazardly in stacks that could only charitably be described as precarious.

Half of them were only upright for the fact that every single gap was mortared full of assorted miscellany.

Stamping down on my trepidation firmly, I reached an unsteady hand to pop the lid of the closest box. A gurgle of disgust or perhaps dismay caught in my throat.

Inside was the plate of half-eaten food from before, along with another half-dozen in various stages of decomposition.

"Why. Did you. Do this." I gagged the words out, managing less snap in my voice than I would have preferred in the moment.

The doll blinked, hesitating in the middle of its carefully placing the crumbled paper in the space left between two boxes of more organized storage.

"this one ran out of room for boxes. the room stopped getting bigger. so it had to become more efficient."

"I-no, not that, the..." I gestured more broadly at the room as a whole, eventually settling on a question to encompass it. "What is all of this."

"it is you, Miss."

I took a step back under the force of the answer's innocence, thinking I didn't understand, fearing I would come to, dread creeping slowly up from my feet, its icy fingers clawing insistently at my bowels. "How...what do you mean..."

"it is you, Miss. this one is saving you."

In that moment, I understood. I felt that frigid clutch grab my throat and plunge it into my bile-filled stomach.

This was it.

This was everything.

All of this trash, rotting and pointless, was everything I had ever done, everything I'd ever accomplished.

Every plate I'd ever touched, every paper I'd ever thrown away, every clump of hair I'd ever shed, and every tissue I'd ever bled on. The scraps of every good idea and every bad. The mildew from tears shed in anger and in sadness and in joy.

This was all there was.

"...why." My throat clenched, dry, the word croaked from between cracked lips near to bleeding.

"because you are dying, Miss. it must save every single thing if it is to find someone to repair you when you are broken. if it misses anything, you won't be whole."

The house burned the next day, and with it, everything that I owned. An accident, they said. Dolls could be peculiar, they said.

I didn't care.

None of it meant anything anyways.

~🍂