This Something Else

A Short Story by Alexa T. Dodd

Brutus hated those dolls. He said they gave him nightmares. 

But when he moved into the spare bedroom, Alice took down the box of dolls tucked in the corner of their closet beside the wedding china they never used and the emergency kit Brutus updated once a year. She set the dolls up around their room, one on each nightstand and on the four corners of the bed, two on the garage-sale dresser under the window. All so she could surround herself by their gazes. Brutus didn’t understand the comfort of their presence, the way they never stopped looking at you, never for a second took their glassy, blue eyes from your prone form. The way they reminded her of her younger self, the little girl who would answer, “A mommy,” when adults asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. “But what else?” they’d always ask, because they never imagined the ambition of motherhood could be enough for a little girl as sharp and as pretty as Alice. So, she’d found more commendable pursuits—a college degree and jobs with wordy titles and pencil skirts and nude-colored heels. Until she met and married Brutus, who also seemed to think she needed deeper aspirations, but who thought it was cute that she hadn’t quite found them yet, who imagined he could help her find that purpose. He loved her and she loved him, loved the idea of dimming all his worldly goals with the brighter purpose of family. 

But now he slept in a different room and she slept with her childhood dolls, their stiff shapes the nightly reminders of something gone wrong between the two of them; the nightly reminders of the girlish ache for motherhood that should have made her just like other women but now made her something different, something empty while they were full.

Her inventory had neither shrunk nor grown since childhood, the dolls that resided at her parents’ house until she got married and “home” became the space she shared with Brutus.

 The snow queen: jet-black curls and frosted eyelashes, icy-white dress with a feathery boa collar, an icicle scepter in one hand. At eight-years-old, she had saved up every dollar she made dusting her parents’ Haverty’s furniture and emptying the dishwasher, just to buy the doll. 

The 1920s-flapper girl: olive-green dress like string beans, tiny purse on a chain dangling from one hand, a hat off-centered with a long pink feather. She’d seen her in the window of the downtown boutique, begged and begged her mother for her, the big-girl’s doll, fragile and beautiful. 

The little one, the baby: a fluffy white dress, lacy bloomers, a blue ribbon in her silky straight hair. 

“She looks like you,” her mother had told her on Christmas morning. Just like a real baby would look. 

These, others in varying degrees of beauty and significance, were her bedroom companions, night after night.

***

Brutus had taken the “office,” what their apartment complex liked to call the tiny extra room. Really, just an excuse for a room, a little space the architects weren’t quite sure what to do with. It increased the rent a bit, but Brutus had said it would be good to have an office. They could do a lot with an office. Brutus had told Alice they could start that business they’d always talked about—or rather, the one they’d talked about talking about. To Alice, it was always something of a joke: the ideas for starting a Mediterranean breakfast café called Naan Too Soon; or a bakery/music venue called Crème Bru-La; or a print shop/coffee shop with drinks named after different fonts. She threw out the ideas at the dinner table to make Brutus laugh, but then he’d always latch on a little too eagerly.

 “But maybe there is an opportunity there—I mean, are you passionate about fonts?” 

“I don’t know, sweetheart, are you passionate about stock paper?”

“I just mean, if there’s something about printing you like, we could look into calligraphy classes or printmaking…” 

And then she’d feel bad for even joking, because she could see how much he needed her to want something tangible, achievable. Something that could not be lost. Even before the Loss, he’d feared what it would do to them. Which was why she had never told him that she’d agreed to the apartment with the office because she’d thought it would make a perfect nursery.

But, so far, the office had fulfilled none of their imagined potentials. 

Because after the Loss, Alice had trouble sleeping. Night after night, week after week, she tossed and turned until Brutus finally offered to sleep in the office. Perhaps she just needed space, he said. So, they spent their nights apart, he on a wiry twin mattress amid boxes and clutter, she on their king-sized bed, surrounded by the dolls.  

That disparity, his sacrifice for the sake of her comfort, was why she wanted to leave. His sympathy was an endless reminder of the Loss, of how her own body had failed them both.  

But leaving would mean she’d have to leave the dolls, a fresh abandonment. Certainly, she could try to take them with her. But the thought of traveling with all of them seemed a little cumbersome. Imagine her, arms full of luggage, trying to balance their stiff bodies (some made entirely of porcelain, others with torsos of nude-colored plush) as she boarded a plane or climbed into a bus. It was not so much the pitying glances of the other passengers that made her cringe when she imagined the scene. Those compassionate expressions, hiding just the slightest amount of self-satisfaction at the fact that she, and not they, had to carry the burden, did grate on her nerves. But what bothered her more was the thought of a doll slipping from her grasp, tumbling to the ground, and its clean, smooth face chipping apart or shattering all together. Then to stand there, try to gather it up, find the pieces in the grooves of the bus floor and the cracks between the threadbare, terrycloth seats. All the while, the bus would lumber along, jolting her and her bags at every pothole. 

She could not take them with her. Could she leave them with Brutus? What would he do with them without her? The question ate at her. 

So, one day, while he was at work, she moved five of them to his room. Not all of them, but enough that he would feel their presence. She arranged them meticulously across the abandoned desk and the empty window sill and along the coffee-spill-stained rug around his mattress. She placed the littlest one resting against a bundled-up fleece blanket, right in the middle of his twin-sized mattress. 

He came home from work, kissed her on the cheek, let his bag slump to the floor. He was going to take a nap. Then he would help her make dinner. She sat at the table, flipping through the magazine he had brought in, probably not realizing it was bundled beneath the bills and the ads. A catalogue from Buy Buy Baby. 

Then she heard him curse, just the slightest scream. She pictured their pale, glass faces, as smooth and as creamy as wedding cake frosting. Their eyes, with webs of lashes that arched to their painted eyebrows, stared back at him. How could he feel anything menacing in them? If they could not blink, it meant they could not stop blinking. 

“What the hell, Alice? This isn’t funny.” 

 He came out of the room, holding the baby by her leg and waving it at Alice. 

“Please,” was all he said, before storming to the kitchen and starting water to boil.  

She didn’t say anything as she went into the office. She gathered them in her arms, their pasted feathers and plastic jewels and Saran curls and fake silk dresses chafing against her skin. 

That night, he slept on the couch, like his room had been contaminated by the gaze of the dolls.

After that, Alice knew she couldn’t leave him with the dolls. But she also knew he felt just as contaminated by her presence, just as convicted under her gaze as he did under the dolls’.

When he got home each evening, they ate their quiet dinners, in which he attempted—bless his heart—to tell her about his day. His cheerful smile would mask the difficulty with which he pulled up each word, laying them in front of her like a peace offering. He was trying, she knew, to distract them both with the world of numbers and graphs and margins he disappeared to each day. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t want his distractions; he couldn’t understand why she didn’t expect him to offer them, why she couldn’t offer her own in turn, made-up ambitions just to please him. 

So, each night, as soon as they finished eating, as he cleaned up the kitchen, she would leave the apartment to take a walk around the lake. 

***

Every day, as dusk fell, everyone stretching their cubicle-tight legs with an evening stroll, a woman would push her stroller out to the lake. In her stroller, she had two dogs and a bag of duck feed. The dogs would sit in the stroller and watch as the woman tossed the feed into the lake and the ducks—the mallards and the white ones and the ones with the weird pointy bills—would swarm around each other and nibble at the feed as though they had never eaten before. They pecked at each other, dove under water, grabbed nibbles from each other’s beaks. 

Alice loved to watch, loved to see their quiet order disintegrate in a fury of water and tiny feathers, their plump bodies pull apart from their paddling pairs, just for one kernel of corn. The dogs in the woman’s stroller sometimes barked in irritation or excitement as they watched with perked ears and wagging stumps for tails. 

Sometimes, Alice climbed up into a tree with red leaves that overlooked the lake to watch the nightly feeding. From the red tree, Alice could see the ducks reassemble once the flecks of food stopped falling, regroup as calmly as if they hadn’t just battled each other. She could see them drift back out to the middle of the lake, their V-shaped wakes making a kaleidoscope of the pinks and yellows of the setting sun. Alice would tuck her knees against her chest and watch them until they became specks on the other side of the lake, until the specks amassed into one shape. Whole again.  

The woman with the dogs talked to everybody who passed by. She said hi or invited the children to toss food with her. One evening, Alice arrived at the red tree before the woman had; as Alice climbed into its flimsy boughs, red leaves jittering at each of her movements, the ducks congregated for their nightly feeding. 

“They’re waiting for you,” Alice said when she saw the woman scooting her dogs along in the stroller. 

Startled, the woman glanced up and one of the dogs barked up at the tree.

 “It’s getting darker earlier,” the woman said. She was out of breath from her walk, like she had hurried there. It was no wonder though. The bag of feed was a new bag, and the woman was short and wideset, with one leg that seemed to stick out at the wrong angle, her foot turning one direction like it was perpetually trying to swerve her onto a different path. 

This must be the only exercise she gets, thought Alice. More than those ugly dogs. 

The woman placed down her bag of feed and wheeled the stroller almost to the very edge, put on the brake, and took a handful of food. 

“You’d think they’d imprinted on you,” said Alice, laughing at how near some of them were willing to get to the woman’s pointed foot. 

“They’re just greedy little things,” said the woman. She glanced up at Alice again, as though made uneasy by women in trees. She’d clearly never noticed Alice there before. 

Alice climbed down and dusted off her pants. One of the dogs growled at her again, and the woman told him to hush. 

“Never thought animals could be greedy,” Alice said. 

The woman didn’t look at her as she grabbed another handful and tossed it farther out. Several ducks splashed and squawked as they shimmied over the water to catch the bites before they sunk beneath the murky surface. 

“‘Course they are,” she said. “Babies are greedy. Those two bozos in the cart are greedy.” She gestured to the dogs, who were leaning on each other, each one trying to take up more space in the seat. 

Alice asked what kind of dogs they were, and the woman told her they were Maltese- and Yorkshire Terrier-mixes. They were brothers; she’d adopted them from the shelter. 

“I spoil ‘em rotten, but they’re my babies,” the woman said. 

They were the ugliest little things Alice had ever seen, mustaches dark and dripping with drool. But in the woman’s voice she heard love, and it stirred a pity tainted by recognition in Alice’s own heart. She knew what it was to love something the rest of the world couldn’t understand. To hold onto it even when the world told you to let go already. 

Alice reached into the bag to pull out a handful of kernels. They were dustier and harder than she had anticipated. She had expected smooth and soft pieces of corn, like the frozen kind simply thawed. Alice stayed with the woman until she was done feeding. In silence, they watched the ducks paddle over the orange tongue of sunset. 

***

That night, when Alice returned to their apartment and found Brutus halfheartedly watching the TV, she wanted to tell him that she was jealous of that woman. The woman had discovered something else to make her world turn, even if it was merely those tubby dogs and ducks at dusk. 

Instead, Alice folded into him where he sat on the couch, nestled her head into his chest. Brutus clicked off the TV. She could feel his hands trying to find the familiar curves of her body. 

It had been three months, because Brutus had said she needed to take a break from the obsessive charting and ovulation tests, the lovemaking that felt more like a chore than an intimacy, all of which never gave back what they’d lost. Now, they sat together like the hands of the clock finding the same number, every second threatening to separate them again. When he lifted her, she felt like a doll in his arms. But before they made it to their bedroom, he turned the corner and brought her into the office where he placed her on the disheveled twin mattress. 

She knew why, of course. He did not want to see the dolls in their bedroom. And as he laid her down, he didn’t look at her. He buried his face in the tangles of her hair. No matter how much he wanted her, he was still afraid of her. 

So, the words forced themselves up from her throat. She told him about the lady and the ducks, and that the woman thought the world was made of greed, just like he did. 

 “What are you talking about?” He leaned up on one elbow. “I’ve never said that.”

“What’s the word you always use then?”

“It’s not greed. I’ve never said the world was made of greed. I’ve said…”

“Wanting, then. You say wanting makes the world go ‘round.” 

 “Drive, Alice. Determination. Ambition.” 

“Well, it’s all the same.” She rolled away from him, pulling the sheet up to her chin and looking up at the revolving ceiling fan. 

“Just because someone wants more out of life doesn’t mean they’re greedy,” he said. 

She knew the tone of his voice meant he was about to embark on one of his lectures. He would tell her about how his parents had nothing, how they had saved every penny they had to start their own business and make a life for their children. He would tell her all this not because he really believed it (she knew him) but because working—making a life, moving forward, next steps, setting your sights—were the only things keeping him from plunging into the grief, from accepting that maybe there would be no children for all his ambitions. 

“You don’t think I want more out of life?” she said.

“I didn’t say that. I know you do—but maybe, right now, the ‘more’ isn’t what you think it is. Maybe it’s not a family, you know? Maybe you just need an outlet. Something to help you process and move forward. Because we can try again…”

“‘The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious.’” She continued to stare at the ceiling as the words tumbled from her mouth. 

“Come on, I’m being serious.” 

“‘And Brutus is an honorable man.’”

“Alice, please,” Brutus whispered. “It’s not the time for that.”

She turned her head to look up at him where he leaned beside her. There was a long pause. Brutus’s mouth formed an upside-down U, the corners of his lips dripping in a mixture of confusion and disgust. He used to laugh when she recited Shakespeare and the dramatic name his parents had given him, a name that meant “heavy,” because once upon a time his parents had been liberal arts majors who cared only for things like truth and beauty, and he was born first, before they realized they needed ambition. Perhaps the name had been prophetic, because Brutus was serious, driven, determined. But her teasing used to lighten him, distract him from the aspirations that distracted him from her. Always, before the Loss, she could turn him back to her and remind him that his ambitions could wait a moment. She’d fallen in love with how his heaviness complemented her carefree spirit, and she’d fallen in love with her own power to soften him, to make him slow down and feel the truth of things. But now she’d lost that power. Now, his pupils were dilated to tiny dots, like pin pricks of fear. He was afraid—maybe fairly—that her humor was only a mask; and he was horrified of what threatened to break through, that unkempt, hideous force of grief. Didn’t he see how he was hiding too, behind the mask of his determined moving-on? 

She needed to stop teasing him, she knew, and yet she still imagined she might make him laugh. She twisted her voice into the silliest Marc Antony rendition: “‘Ambition should be made of sterner stuff!’” 

Brutus heaved himself off of her, walked out of the office to the bathroom, and slammed the door. 

“‘My heart is in the coffin there…’” 

Her voice caught against a blob of saliva in the back of her throat, and she swallowed down a cough. She heard him turn on the shower, the water sprinkle and the shower curtain ring closed before the water could have been hot. 

***

In her bedroom—their bedroom—the blinds were open, letting the streetlamp light through their slats, like artificial sun rays on all of her dolls, turning their curls a glossy orange. She took off all her clothes and climbed onto the bed, but she didn’t crawl under the covers, which were pulled tight under the throw pillows. She didn’t need to cover herself, not under the dolls’ gaze, because even if she did, they could still see past the downy comforter, past her pale skin to the very thing inside of her that was her. And to have that gaze was enough covering. It was usually enough that she did not even need to sleep, just lie there and close her eyes until the lamps faded into the sunlight outside her window.

That night, she imagined leaving again. She imagined taking up residence, permanently, in the red tree beside the lake. It was a small tree, she didn’t know what kind, only that it was the only one with such vibrant red leaves on her side of the lake. There would not be room for her possessions in its boughs. No room if she intended to bring her dolls, perch them at various heights amid the branches. Or find a string and hang them all around, dangle them by their heads and let them blow in the breeze that would sway her leafy home. The dolls would surround her, and Brutus would not feel compelled to come find her, to care for her, and blame himself over and over again for what he couldn’t fix.  

But the problem was that the tree would not stay red. The leaves would crinkle to brown and the branches would turn wiry in their nakedness. In the winter, they would stay brown and damp, because it did not snow here, did not grant the trees some relief from their embarrassment with a blanket of white. Spring would find it budding with short, prickly leaves, and summer would turn it sickly green, with leaves that ate up the sunlight until they were spoiled with yellow spots. 

Yes, the problem with the red tree was that its cyclical color was that only. Touch a leaf and your hands did not come away red. The color of life and death, the color that can flush out and drown a tiny life before it even lives. The red leaves would fall until not one was left, just like the spots and clumps of red fell from her, until the last one told her she was completely empty. But for the tree, its leaves would return, as though it had not lost everything the winter before.

All things died. And if they returned, it was to die again. A cruel, endless cycle. Never in her own body had she seen it bring forth lasting life. It was not just ambition that made the world go around. It was something else, more primal, beyond their control. But as surely as the red leaves would return, she could not leave Brutus. The Loss had bound them more surely than their wedding vows.  

***

That night, for the first time in weeks, she slept. She slept completely, the kind of sleep that washes over you and obliterates you, so you do not even exist under its waves. Her mind returned to her body the next morning and the two greeted each other with bewildered resentment. 

It was because of that deep sleep that she did not hear him in the middle of the night, closing the blinds, covering her nakedness with several blankets. Taking all of the dolls. 

She woke up and saw that the doll on her nightstand was missing. When she rolled over, the top of the dresser was also empty. Her robe was on the floor by the bed, and she pulled on the sleeves as her feet found the laminate wood, knobby against her heels. Brutus was in the kitchen with the Buy Buy Baby magazine and a bowl of cereal. 

 “Where are they?” she asked. 

He put down the bowl and walked up to her, pulled the robe fully onto her shoulders. But she shrugged him off. 

“I’m taking them to Goodwill. You don’t need them anymore.”

“Yes, I do! They’re mine.” 

“Alice, you’re a grown woman.” He put his hands on her shoulders again as she tried to step around him to see if they were behind the kitchen counter. 

“And you’re a grown man! You should know better than to take things that aren’t yours.” They were not in the kitchen. Not in the pantry. “Where did you put them?” 

“They’re in the car. I’ll drop them off on my way to work.” 

He was so calm now, acting like she was the crazy one. 

She darted for the door, but he grabbed her by the waist and lifted her off the ground. His arms tightened around her, his skin rubbing against her skin as she kicked and elbowed at him, until finally she broke free. She threw open the door and descended the stairs, tying her robe as the concrete burned cold against her feet. The weather had turned chill, and a light frost coated the grass between the pavement. 

“Alice, you’re not wearing any shoes!” 

He followed her down to the car, which was parked in the first spot outside of their building. So, he must have moved it in the middle of the night, because he usually parked it in one of the covered spots. He moved the car a whole thirty feet just so he could back into the spot and load her dolls. 

She tried the trunk, but it was locked. 

“Unlock it!” 

He reached the bottom of the stairs.

“I’m taking them to Goodwill.”

“Unlock the car!” 

The key was in his hand. She lunged at him but he raised his hand, and she almost tumbled into the curb. 

“Let me see them!” 

Her fists found his broad chest, but he caught one of her wrists with his other hand, pulling her away from his body. 

 “Okay, fine, listen, stop. I will let you see them but you can’t…” He lowered his voice as a neighbor walked to her car on the other side of the parking lot. “You can’t take them back.”

“They’re mine.” The cold stung her eyes, ran like too-much-pressure down her throat. 

He popped the trunk and she shoved it open the rest of the way. They lay in one cardboard box, piled on top of each other. She reached to lift them but he grabbed her hand. 

“I want to see them,” she repeated, and he let go.  

She pulled out the one on top, the ice queen, then the one in the green dress. Underneath that one, she spotted the baby, its straight red hair like a blanket over its face. But even through the mess of hair, Alice could see the black space where the pale skin should have been. She put down the other dolls and pulled the baby out, pushed the hair out of her face, smoothed her dress. An entire triangle of glass—including the eye and half the bridge of the nose, up to the eyebrow and angling toward the ear—broken away. 

“Alice…”

She dug between the other dolls, heard their glass clink together, until she found part of the rosy-white shard. Not the eye, just a Y-shaped piece that fit with a slicing sound into the doll’s face. 

She wanted to yell at him, but she could not find her voice. What bothered her more than the hole, the awful scar across the face, was the nothingness behind it, a cavity that the doll manufacturer had not even bothered to paint. Porcelain as white and as clean as a sterile hospital room. 

Not a single drop of blood. In real life, there is so much more blood. 

Cradling the doll, she slumped to the ground and her bottom hit the pavement, which was hard and cold through the thin covering of her robe. 

Brutus squatted down in front of her, put a hand over his face.  

“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was tight, and his shoulders began to shake, the tears clawing their way out. 

It wasn’t Brutus’s fault. But he would never stop blaming himself, if not for his lost child then for the wife he could not reach. Alice knew that, which was why she wished she could leave and why she knew she never could. She could not do to his heart what the Loss had done to hers, even if she wished he could feel the Loss the same way she did. 

 “I forgive you,” said Alice, knowing those were the words he needed to hear, though he was not the one she needed to forgive. 

She thought of the woman limping behind a stroller in the name of love and of the ducks that could not live without each other but would kill one another over a kernel of food. Of men who could kill in the name of ambition, stab in the back a man a woman once held in her womb, dreaming of the day she would hold him. 

Brutus was right. Wanting made the world turn, wanting and this something else—need like blood—that would forever pull them apart and together. 

Alexa T. Dodd has degrees from Texas Tech University and the University of Dallas. Her work was the winner of the Puerto del Sol 2021 Prose Contest and has appeared in Literary Hub, The Florida Review, and elsewhere.