Polly Applebalm's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Polly Applebalm held the button and could not stop. She was a red-haired baby doll in a green dress, and her maker had sewn something into her long ago. It still lived inside her. It felt like a second person, always close, always breathing when she did not. She wanted one thing: to be free of the porcelain and finally rest. The button was her only clue. She just did not know why. She sat in the green dollhouse where she had hidden her maker's three objects. Tiny windows glowed orange and sick green. The button rested in her stitched hand, small and gray, ringed with marks she could not read. Sometimes a face seemed to drift across its surface. She had tried to set it on the floor many times. Her fingers refused. "Why you?" she whispered to it. "Why not the others?" The button grew warm. The warmth answered her the way the presence inside her always did, without words. Polly stared at the marks along the button's rim. She had seen such marks once before. On the lid of a music box. The same box that had played in a locked room while she sat alone, though no hand had touched the key. She had never understood that night. Now she wondered if the button and the box spoke the same language. She climbed down from the dollhouse and found the box where she had left it. A painted ballerina stood on top. Below the dancer, a name curled in gold letters: Diana. Polly had never known whose name it was. She pressed the button against the lid. The marks matched. The lid lifted on its own. Thin music spilled out, slow and cracked. The ballerina turned. In the music Polly heard a woman's voice, far off, speaking a single name over and over. Diana. Diana. The presence inside Polly leaned toward the sound, hungry, as if it had waited years to hear it. Polly understood at last. The button did not belong to her maker alone. It belonged to the thing sewn inside her. It was that thing's token, its tether, the knot that bound its spirit to her shell. She held the button because the button held it, and the thing held her. The maker had not trapped Polly by mistake. The maker had used her as a cage. The music stopped. The ballerina froze mid-turn. For one breath the dollhouse went silent and still. Then the gold letters on the box flared cold and bright. The name moved. It was no longer only a name on a box. Somewhere, Polly felt, a woman named Diana had just turned her head toward the sound. And the presence inside Polly turned too, pulling her toward a door she had not yet found.