Baby Doll (The Spitfire Grill, 525 wds.)
title: Baby Doll
fandom: The Spitfire Grill
characters: Shelby
word count: 525
rating: G
summary: Shelby's always been a mothering type...
At four years old, Shelby called her dolls her ‘children,’ and loved them with a quiet fierceness that she had no words for.
At eleven, while the kids around her in the schoolyard played hopscotch and baseball, yelled and shouted and laughed, she took herself to a shaded corner, back to an ancient tree’s rough bark, and took out her dolls again. They were a bit more faded now, a bit more battered, but their plastic painted smiles were as baby-sweet as ever to her mothering eyes, and she had taken good care of her ‘children’ - none were in very poor condition.
At fourteen, her Papa - still and always Papa to her, while her sister and brothers, older and younger and all tumbling around her in ages, unanimously called him ‘Dad,’ and even the baby at eight years old managed a stuttering ‘Daddy’ - thought it high time silly, silent Shelby stopped playing with baby dolls. The kids thought so, too; their teasing and taunting in the schoolyard, under the shade of the rough and silent trees, did more to rid her of her babies than Papa’s slamming of doors and fingers. She hid them, her children, her brood of half a dozen, under her bed and in her closet, wrapped up like mummies, like caterpillars, cocooned and wordless darlings waiting for the light of a new life - light of her yellow plastic lantern, which she propped up on a shoebox, late at night, long after her bedtime, when she sneaked into the closet and saw to her babies. Locking them away, caring for them only at night - all the secrecy served only to make them more appealing, more desirable to their timid, pale mamma. But she came to feel something shameful about motherhood; shameful to be mothering these plastic infants, so helpless, with their dangling, pathetic cloth limbs, shameful to long for the mother of her own who had divorced her dad, daddy, papa, gotten a career and a shorter skirt and put both into the back of the taxi that peeled her away to the airport, right out of Shelby’s life.
Yes, motherhood was shameful- and there was, there must be, something wrong with any girls who wanted it. (Mamma, Shelby knew, had been just old enough at the time, to realize, had not - oh, she had married in good faith, but five babies later, and all she longed for was skyscrapers and powersuits.)
At thirty four years old, she wondered if it was this shame and indignity of her hidden dolls - long since consigned to the dusty trunks of attic-bound memories - and hidden maternity that prevented her and Caleb from having children of their own.
Then Percy came, with a fake, trying-too-hard smile, with long arms and legs, dangling and dangerous in flannel and jeans, with eyes as hard and hurt as plastic. She came, wrapped in a cocoon of grief and pain and anger and futility, and Shelby, loving her with quiet fierceness, didn’t hide this poor baby in a closet or a schoolyard corner; she felt just as strong as skyscrapers and short skirts, now, and as shameless as the forest.
fandom: The Spitfire Grill
characters: Shelby
word count: 525
rating: G
summary: Shelby's always been a mothering type...
At four years old, Shelby called her dolls her ‘children,’ and loved them with a quiet fierceness that she had no words for.
At eleven, while the kids around her in the schoolyard played hopscotch and baseball, yelled and shouted and laughed, she took herself to a shaded corner, back to an ancient tree’s rough bark, and took out her dolls again. They were a bit more faded now, a bit more battered, but their plastic painted smiles were as baby-sweet as ever to her mothering eyes, and she had taken good care of her ‘children’ - none were in very poor condition.
At fourteen, her Papa - still and always Papa to her, while her sister and brothers, older and younger and all tumbling around her in ages, unanimously called him ‘Dad,’ and even the baby at eight years old managed a stuttering ‘Daddy’ - thought it high time silly, silent Shelby stopped playing with baby dolls. The kids thought so, too; their teasing and taunting in the schoolyard, under the shade of the rough and silent trees, did more to rid her of her babies than Papa’s slamming of doors and fingers. She hid them, her children, her brood of half a dozen, under her bed and in her closet, wrapped up like mummies, like caterpillars, cocooned and wordless darlings waiting for the light of a new life - light of her yellow plastic lantern, which she propped up on a shoebox, late at night, long after her bedtime, when she sneaked into the closet and saw to her babies. Locking them away, caring for them only at night - all the secrecy served only to make them more appealing, more desirable to their timid, pale mamma. But she came to feel something shameful about motherhood; shameful to be mothering these plastic infants, so helpless, with their dangling, pathetic cloth limbs, shameful to long for the mother of her own who had divorced her dad, daddy, papa, gotten a career and a shorter skirt and put both into the back of the taxi that peeled her away to the airport, right out of Shelby’s life.
Yes, motherhood was shameful- and there was, there must be, something wrong with any girls who wanted it. (Mamma, Shelby knew, had been just old enough at the time, to realize, had not - oh, she had married in good faith, but five babies later, and all she longed for was skyscrapers and powersuits.)
At thirty four years old, she wondered if it was this shame and indignity of her hidden dolls - long since consigned to the dusty trunks of attic-bound memories - and hidden maternity that prevented her and Caleb from having children of their own.
Then Percy came, with a fake, trying-too-hard smile, with long arms and legs, dangling and dangerous in flannel and jeans, with eyes as hard and hurt as plastic. She came, wrapped in a cocoon of grief and pain and anger and futility, and Shelby, loving her with quiet fierceness, didn’t hide this poor baby in a closet or a schoolyard corner; she felt just as strong as skyscrapers and short skirts, now, and as shameless as the forest.