The Doll House

Winner of My Fair Lighthouse Short Fiction prize

It came with furniture, though all that’s left of that are a few plastic apples and a crochet doily rug that’s so battered you’d think it was actually walked on for decades. Someone left a hard candy in it once and when it came off, it took a chunk of the flowery wallpaper with it. It’s been loved, that’s the point. That’s why there are all these stains, rips, and places where the wood is different colors. Only unloved houses stay the same.

The first family that lived here were bears, and they were too big to fit through the door, so they walked through the invisible walls and pretended the real door was a window. They ate a lot of porridge and told the same stories over and over, and when the mama bear’s apron broke, they made a new one from the curtains. They were then replaced with the bedsheets from the spare room. (Their neighbor, Mr Spider, who was visiting, didn’t need bedsheets. He made his own.)

The next family were all mice, and lots of them. Over Christmas, the house stayed in the attic, where a nice young man took his many children on holiday. They liked to gnaw on the table and the edges of the walls. Some of the hinges came loose in that time, but the mice protected the house from the other critters. Mr Spider was evicted, but soon found other accommodation in an old pair of boots. The wallpaper was chewed up and speckled with little mouse teeth. Other than that, they kept it tidy, sweeping it once a day and wiping down the windows often. They huddled together in the kitchen and listened to the caroling after a long day in the snow, and when the hatch opened and two big human hands took the house out, they had already cleared out and carved a nice message into the floor tiles. Nobody could read it, though, so the tiles came up and were replaced with a paper-mache mosaic cut out of different pages of magazines.

The new dollies loved that floor. They could look at any mismatched tile and tell exactly what magazine it was from. A nice indigo from Vogue, a cherry-red that was the color of a new shade of lipstick, the sunset yellow of a skirt from Paris Fashion Week. The two dolls lived alone, and despite the rumors, were friends in real life. They talked a lot about work, and dressed up all the time, even for bed. They were there for each other, even when one of them got a bad haircut and realized it wasn’t going to grow back. They liked to make clothes as much as buying them. This hobby turned to a passion, and the washing line that hung from the kitchen into the master bedroom never came down, but never held another garment again. The dolls left one day and never returned. One could only hope they made it big.

It didn’t make sense for someone to just buy the home of such a famous pair, so the house stayed empty, as a sort of museum. The mosaic floor stayed behind with the washing line, remembering high fashion, expensive taste, and many catwalks over the upstairs hallway. After a while, they found an audience, only it was one that didn’t use the front door, or walk through the invisible walls, or even climb through the windows, like the baby bear once did and snagged his sweater. Out of the corners of the rooms and under the beds rolled out dust bunnies. They stayed where they were, listening with their lint ears for movements. When the coast was clear they rumbled down the stairs and back up, bounding up on the walls and up onto the tables. They covered every surface in a fluffy coating. They liked to gather on the doily carpet and roll themselves up, then roll back out with speed, shooting fluff everywhere like a snowfall. They escaped when the dollhouse opened up for visitors again, each going their own way, claiming their corner and finding new rugs to roll in. If you look close enough you can see the threads they all stole from the rug, twisted around them like bracelets.

It’s been a family home, holiday cabin, celebrity hideout, museum and a grave to be robbed, but its story isn’t over yet. Now, it’s a haunted house. The broken windows and caved-in roof are something to get used to, sure, but there’s a charm in them for the right tenant. A set of flickering fairy lights under the stairs may be the selling point. Maybe a ghost family is looking to rent?