Dull House

I know a lot of people don’t like their jobs, and yet I cannot possibly imagine anyone having a job worse than mine. I can’t stand the uniform: itchy, blindingly white, so if gets stained it’s noticeable. The pay is not good either, just better than my last job.

The worst part is the tasks I get assigned. Not all are equally bad, and if the task lasts from two days to two weeks, it’s an okay task. Anything from two weeks to two months is insanely annoying and sometimes boring. If it goes over two months, well… That has only happened the one time, and I did get a pretty good raise after that.

It was Spring, and the only good thing about the task were the trees that grew around the house. They were the most gorgeous, vibrant trees, and I remember watching them through the window for hours during those first few weeks, before things got bad. I specially liked the way the sun shone at a certain afternoon hour, when you had to squint to be able to see the silhouette of the thin branches as the sun passed behind them. In the early mornings you could see them reflected on the wall, and it looked like a still-life painting.

I was assigned with the task on Monday, and by Wednesday they’d sent me on my way to the house. I arrived just as the people who lived there seemed to be having some sort of celebration. There were balloons, and four people sitting around a table eating cake out of plastic plates.

“Daddy,” said a little girl who was shoving cake into her mouth with a plastic fork. “There’s someone at the door!”

The man across the table from her sat up straight, startled: he’d been too distracted and missed the doorbell ringing. 

He was ugly. I don’t know if I thought that right away or if I begun to think that after living with him, but I know that he had the manners of a pig. He didn’t have enough hair on his face to grow a proper beard, but never shaved either, so that his face looked almost dirty with tiny little hairs. He wasn’t bald, but balding, and it showed. His eyebrows looked like two rats were using his forehead as a sleeping spot and his eyes were baggy and of a dull gray color. He couldn’t dress himself properly, except for that first day. That day, he had a tie on.

“Oh, right,” he said to the little girl that very first day. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. Did you invite anyone else, Madeline?”

The woman sat next to him shook her head, uninterested. “Who else would I invite?”

“I can get the door,” said the little boy across from her. 

“That’s okay, Matthew,” the woman said. “Your father can get it. It’ll do him good to get off his butt a little.”

The man frowned at her. “I do things, you know?”

As if to prove it, he got up and walked towards the front door. He opened it, and found me standing outside. He bent down, picked the box up with me inside it, and took a look. He picked up the envelope that had been attached to the box, and began reading the letter inside it.

My dear son,

I am sorry I cannot be with you for your fortieth birthday. I know you’re used to spending your birthdays with your mama and I can’t imagine how hard it must be for you this year.

As much as I know you aren’t well to care for the children since your wife passed, I think you must feel lonely without them, which is why I am sending you this. You probably think this is silly, but this doll has been with our family for generations. It was the first doll I ever owned, and the first doll my mother and grandmother ever owned as well.

Now, I hoped to give her to your sister Madeline someday, but I think you should have it, darling, to keep you company during these tough times.

Happy birthday, sweetheart!

Mom

The man laughed, folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He picked up the box and took me inside the house.

“Hey, Madeline,” he announced, finding his family in the kitchen. “Check it out. Mom sent me a doll.”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “I’d throw it out if I were you.”

“Yeah, yeah, but it’s a nice gesture. She said it could keep me company.”

“You know who else could keep you company?” The woman pointed at the kids across the table from her. “Your children.”

The man brought his hand to his chest, offended. “Oh, and they do! They do!”

He put the box down on the table, and ran towards the boy and girl, wrapping an arm around each of them. “They’re my precious little bugs, and they know Daddy’s picking them up soon and they’re coming back home where they belong. And aren’t they lucky to have such a good auntie? Huh? Don’t they just love auntie Madeline? Yeah?”

I stayed at that table for a while, as the man and the woman picked up the plates and forks and tossed them in the trash. Around an hour later, the woman and children left, and the man grabbed my box again. He tore it apart, took me out of it, and looked at me for a moment.

Finally, he said: “You’re a creepy little thing.”

Ouch.

For the first couple of weeks, he put me in a strange room. He only came in there once in a while to pick something up, but never me. It was a messy room, with a bunch of odd furniture and old things. At least there was the view, with the trees and the sun.

But it made my job a whole lot harder: how are you supposed to be a haunted doll if you can’t haunt? I was trapped in this room, and couldn´t reach the door handle to let myself out. Sometimes, when he came in, I tried moving a little to see if he noticed, but he never glanced at me. 

The only thing I could do to call his attention was get up and speak to him, but the rules were specific: first, you had to haunt them quietly, only move when they weren’t looking, so eventually they would notice that you’d moved from one place to a slightly different one. Then, you could move to places even further away and, finally, after they realized you were haunted, you could kill them.

I didn’t like that last part. At my last job, I was a children’s doll, and sometimes kids would rip my head off, but at least I never had to kill anyone. In this job, people hire our company when they want someone killed and don’t want to do it themselves. No one would suspect the doll, they say.

Who wanted this man killed, I don’t know. They never tell me. I can only imagine his mother did, since she was the one who sent me.

After those first torturous couple of weeks, there came a day when the man drunkenly walked into the room at four in the afternoon, reeking of beer, and picked me up. He walked me to the living room, and sat me on the couch, where he’d been watching a football game on the TV.

“Here,” he said, patting me on the head. “You’re supposed to keep me company. Oh, little dolly, my sister thinks that I’m a dead-beat. She’ll never let me get my kids back, do you know that? She stole them from me. And maybe… Maybe she's right! Ha-ha-ha-ha.”

He kept talking for a while. I wanted to kill him, but it was too early, so I waited until he fell asleep. Then, I got off the couch and walked towards the kitchen. I sat next to fridge, and waited until he woke the next morning, when he accidentally stepped on me on his way to open his fridge. He laughed, picked me up, and put me on the kitchen counter.

Later that day, I made the first real move. The man had ordered a pizza for lunch and, as he went out to get it, I moved from the counter to inside the sink. It was wet and made my little white dress wet too, but I was sure he would notice. 

He stepped back in, pizza box in hands, and stared at me in the sink. “Lord,” he uttered. “I’m going insane.”

That same day, as the man got up from the couch to toss the pizza box out, I moved again, and sat by the window. The man stared.

He said: “Hello?” 

He picked me up. He flipped me upside down.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked me, spinning me around. “You’re creeping me out, doll.”

His breath stank. He pulled my hair. 

“Ouch!” I screamed, without thinking. The man let me go, and I fell on the counter with a loud thud. He took a step back. 

I could still fix it. All I had to do was speed up the process, kill him before he had the chance to…

The man smiled at me with his yellow crooked teeth. “I knew I wasn’t going crazy. Hello, doll. What’s your name? Huh? What’s your name?”

I couldn't speak again, not without being fired. I stood perfectly still. The man opened a drawer and picked up a knife.

He pointed the knife at me. “Tell me, doll. If you can move… What else can you do? Huh? Are you afraid I’m gonna kill you? Because I will. Trust me, I will. You’re going to help me, aren’t you, doll? Yes you are.” 

The next morning, I found myself mopping this man’s kitchen. 

Once I was done with the kitchen, he had me clean the living room, vacuum his disgusting couch, and wipe his greasy remote controls.

“You’re a good doll,” he kept saying. “We’ll make this house clean. I’ll show my sister. I’ll show mom. I’ll show everyone how sane I am.”

This went on for a while. There was so much in his house to clean, and I wished to kill him, but I couldn’t, because he followed me around with a knife all day, and I was too small. At night, he locked me in that old room before going to bed, so that I couldn’t run away or get the knife myself.

He was sick, even sicker than I had predicted, and I began to suspect something sinister was going on. One night, after he’d locked me in that room, I’d begun to inspect his things and found a photo of him and a woman I hadn’t seen before. On a different day, while doing his laundry, I found one of his shirts was splashed with blood. Who was this man, whose mother knew something so terrible about that she wanted him dead?

One night, I decided it was time to try something new. I’d been cleaning his bathroom one day, and found medicine in his cabinet. I’d picked up a few pills and hid them under my dress. Sometimes, before a game came on, he’d ask me to get him a beer, and that night was no different. I grabbed a can of beer from the fridge, opened the lid, and checked if he was looking: he was not. 

I picked up the pills, crushed them under the can, careful not to make noise, tossed the crushed pills in the beer, and gave it a good shake.

I walked into the living room and handed the man his can.

“You’re really not gonna talk to me, are you doll?” he asked. “You should talk to me. I’m a good guy.”

The man drank the beer. He went out a few minutes later. I picked up the knife from his pocket and killed him. The doorbell rang, and it was his sister.

“Robert?” she screamed, banging on the door. “You said you were coming to take your daughter to ballet class. You got her crying in my car out here. Robert, come on. You’re pathetic. Answer me. You know I have a key!”

I didn’t know that. I dropped the knife on the couch, sat on the floor, like a pretty little doll. The woman walked in. She was fuming. She looked at the dead man, knife by his side, then at me, white dress stained red. Slowly, she stepped back until she was out of the house, and closed the door.

I cannot possibly imagine anyone having a job worse than mine.