The Doll named Kie

In a house on a hill away from the people, placed carefully in a window is a doll named Kie. Made of porcelain fine and white, her lips red like fresh blood, her cheeks extra pink to bring out her marble green eyes which were partially hidden behind black curls. Her hands clasped as best as they could be with dolly hands, her head had been turned to face outside the window at the world. From this window she could see little towns where people were getting ready for festivals, she could see the rising houses in he suburbs, and she could see the City, glistening despite all its grime and scandal. It was in front of this window she sat, watching and waiting, silently though as she was made to be that way.

This doll, Kie, hadn't just been placed in this window by unseen hands. When she had been first brought to the house on the hill, a woman in her twenties owned her. She would talk to the doll, dress it up in various coloured dresses, only the finest purple silks and green brocade satin jackets and when the woman had given birth to a little girl named Jenny, the doll was brought to witness the child's first glimpse of the world. 

The child, Jenny, had reached out with her little baby hands and tugged on the dress, causing a small tear in the fabric. 

"Oh, Jenny!" The woman gasped. And the doll was whisked away, back to her place at the window. Crooked, lopsided, and her dress now torn, the doll didn't care. She was happy to have seen the baby. The woman will come back and place me facing out the window, thought the doll. Then perhaps I can see more pretty children. 

But the woman did not come back for a long time. For six years the doll sat watching the little Jenny grow up, meeting Jenny's lovely hazel eyes with her own seemingly dispassionate green one. Other dolls were brought to the house on the hill, though none as fine as Kie, and every day she told herself, The woman will come back.

One day, while it was raining, the woman returned to the window and the doll. She sighed and picked the doll, cradling it in her arms. She rocked the doll as if it were alive, (which it was in some sense) and unconsciously began to smile. The doll smiled inwardly, I knew she would come back. And as this shared moment between the doll's inner human and the woman's inner child went on, something passed between them. A jolt, a scatter of thoughts and feelings, of pictures real and imagined. The woman gasped, and dropped the doll. 

Oh my, that was an odd sound, thought the doll as her small porcelain face tapped the edge of the leg of the table beneath the window. A crack spread along her faded cheeks as the woman bent down to pick her up. Still a bit shaken, the woman put the doll back in the window and ran to speak to her husband about moving into the City. The doll smiled,  Oh goodie, the City. I've always wanted to see the City.

Two months later the family of the house on the hill moved into the City that glistened despite all its grime and scandal. A week later they were shot down by a boy who was promptly shot by a girl who lived in the apartment upstairs. Lucinda Violet Williams looked in on the family, sighed, closed the door, locked it with a little silver key and drew an X in red chalk across the door. 

"Another one bites the dust." She whispered, as she climbed the stairs back to her apartment.

The doll is not in the apartment. The doll is not in the house on the hill. She fell out of a box while the family was moving in, little Jenny saw, but didn't say anything. She climbed up the stairs to the apartment with her parents and never looked back. The day they were shot, just before the boy arrived, Trina Walsh saw the doll in the gutter, a large crack across her face, a eye missing, and her red lips had lost their luster.  Trina picked up the doll, whose inner human was now on the brink of that soul extinguishing event of death, and wrapped it in her scarf. The boy came by, saw the girl and being in the kind mood he was, pushed her into the gutter, kicking her repeatedly until a little line of blood escaped her lips, staining them the color the doll's had once been.  

The doll is presently nowhere to be found.

If you thought the City was like any other city you may live in or may have heard of, you're very wrong. There's a certain way things are supposed to happen in the City, there are certain rules that must be followed. Consider the City a phase of life we all go through in some shape or form. There are people who pass on by, there are people who stop and visit, and there are those who make a living off the misery, the scandal, and the glitter of the lovely horror that be the City. 

Welcome Home.