Aborigen

I knocked on Alexia’s door and she answered promptly, bright-eyed and huge-grinned. “Come in! Oh, you’re going to love this!” she sang. Her little hands gripped my elbow with surprising strength, and I barely reacted fast enough to keep from stumbling up her carpeted stairs.

Her room emanated a cotton-candy pink around the cracks of her door, exploding into a playful, yet somehow intimate, flood of rosy, powdery hues. I’d been here before, and each time she brought me into her bedroom, I had the same psychosomatic response of choking on baby powder, though none was actually present. She whisked me between her bed, rumpled with satiny hot-pink duvet, and the desk across from it. Alexia preferred to keep the dollhouse mounted on the desk, prominently displayed as a crowning piece in her room, but also clearly in view of her bed for her nighttime proclivities.

“What do you think?” She was fairly bouncing on her toes, gold ringlets shuddering in anticipation. Despite being nearly 30, her chosen motif was that of a precocious and spoiled television antagonist from mid-20th century television. Her huge eyes stared at me with a little too much intensity, and her ever-widening grin did not impart the merriment she surely must’ve felt.

I gently pried her fingers from my arm and, as circulation restored, bent to examine the dollhouse. Surprisingly, it was not a large Victorian structure, which would’ve been in keeping with her pinafore and patent shoes, from my thinking. It was a simple four-room building, two on the bottom and two on top, with a plain shingled roof and serviceable windows. Each room was a different color—yellow, pink (of course), green, and off-white for the living room—and positively stuffed with miniature furniture.

Before I could comment, Alexia’s head was gasping next to mine as she recounted her inventory

• Vintage velvet sofa, living room: “I found this in an antique store! I was flush that week and had to get it. The clerk told me it was left over from a set from the 1920s! I cleaned it up and hand-stitched a little pillow stuffed with a lock of my hair.”
• Ceramic lamp, her bedroom: “Last summer I found this at an estate sale. It was invite-only, but I looked like I belonged there, I guess.” Alexia preened at her accomplishment. “The bulb actually works, but I don’t have this house wired for power. Yet. Can you help me with that?”
• Framed picture of a forest, guest bedroom: “I made the frame out of gold Sculpey and clipped the picture from a magazine. I was thinking of a northwoods feel to this room, but it’s hard to find other pieces to go along with that.”
• Wooden coffee table, living room: “My friend Chantal gave me this. It was part of her daughter’s dollhouse, but they chucked it when she had to move. I looked up videos on how to paint it without making it look gummy.”
• Old-fashioned radio, guest bedroom: “There was a flea market outside of Watertown, and I scored this for $10! Touch it, it’s Bakelite.”

On and on this went, the miniature porcelain service she ordered from a miniaturist in Seoul, the hand-carved four-poster bed in her representative room, the tiny bookshelf stocked with blank books “except for these four on the top: I actually wrote original stories in them, with a 0.025 Slicci and a magnifying glass! Perhaps if you’re nice, I’ll let you read them someday,” she added, dropping her tone. By the expression on her face I surmised she was trying to blush, though she didn’t have a demure bone in her body.

I was deeply impressed with her collection, truly, and I said so. The stories behind them were at least as interesting as the pieces themselves, and I repeated this a few times because Alexia was a vain woman and difficult to compliment sufficiently. I did wonder whether the rooms were rather full of her prizes: A tiny resident would find no space between the bed, the nightstands, and the dresser. They would have to crawl over the couch, the coffee table, and the chairs to cross the living room, and it would be impossible to pull out a seat in the dining room for all the mismatched chairs packed around the table. Had she thought about a larger house?

The words were out before I thought twice, but Alexia was not affronted. “Oh, that’s just me! I see these things and I can’t resist. They’ll make sense someday, I’m sure. I guess I hadn’t thought about a bigger dollhouse,” she said, shrugging. “I’ll keep an eye out for that, but that’s not really my priority right now. I really want to get the northwoods guest room decked out, and I can’t quite figure out whether the living room should be retro Americana or all-the-way Victorian. I’ve got enough pieces for both, but neither’s a complete layout!”

I paused at that comment and looked around. She said she had even more, but there wasn’t a field of unhoused furnishings ringing the simple, basic dollhouse. When I asked where she kept everything else, then her countenance darkened. “I don’t like a lot of clutter, so I actually have another little box where I keep the extra stuff. There’s not a lot of room for it all, and it’s hard to keep it from getting damaged or stained.” Pouting, she reached behind the dollhouse and pulled out a wooden box about the size of two little bedrooms, and my blood ran cold.

There was something like a nest of furniture, a footstool, an iron bedframe, the glint of a scattered set of silverware, all ringing a mass of tiny bodies, balled up like a rat-king. Little people, alive, some gasping, some shocked by the light, writhing sickly in the packed mass. Thin little voices wailed, seeing me; arms, broken arms and fingers reached up.

“These little fuckers don’t appreciate what I’m doing.” Alexia’s voice was a low, even growl. “And I don’t know where they come from. They keep showing up, lounging in my rooms, and I stick ’em back here until I can figure out what to do with them. I think some of them are dead and leaking on my furniture.” Her canine glinted in her acutely artistic sneer. “I just can’t be bothered, you know? I’m trying to find the perfect pieces for my house, and it’s like they’re psychically drawn to it. Like ants know how to find you, when you’re just trying to enjoy cookies and tea on the lawn. Fucking annoying.”

I wanted to scoop them out and run away with them; my skin crawled at the thought of touching them. The groans, the wheezing peaked into a shrill howl as she closed the lid on the box and placed it behind the house again. Now I couldn’t see it as a pet project or a source of merriment. All the colors were a callous discord, all the assembled eras and motifs were a mere bandage over an infected wound.

Alexia grinned at me, raising an eyebrow, waiting for me to say something nice about the house, perhaps. To save my life, I could not make my throat work.