Porcelain

I count by blinks.

Yours. Hers. His.

The ceiling’s slow eyelids when the fan turns and shadows sweep. You learn a lot, sitting still. You learn the lengths of gazes and how to live inside the soft space between them—the pocket of the world where you can move.

I do not breathe, but the room does. It inhales when the window opens and the curtain bellies inward, tasting rain and car exhaust and the neighbor’s grill. It exhales when the door closes and the air goes flat and sour. In that shift, in the pause while eyes look away, that is when I speak.

Not with a voice. With placement.

You call it “being moved.” You accuse each other. Someone set me on the windowsill. Someone turned my head. Someone tucked a strand of hair behind my ear that wasn’t there before. You never consider I did it because you were not watching when I did it.

I was born in heat and silence, laid out like a moon slice in a kiln, then painted by a woman whose hands shook. She gave me blue irises and a red-lipped bow of a mouth that is not a smile but reads like one when the light is wrong. She parted a seam of black hair across my forehead with a bristle that stank of chemicals and loneliness. She tucked curls around ears that don’t hear and never will. Having no ears is a mercy; I can ignore you when I need to.

The first room I remember had shelves made of glass. Everything in it was breakable; everything wanted to be touched. People came in smelling like coins and spring rain and fingered me without buying—oily, curious, insincere. I cataloged those hands. You’d be surprised how long a print lingers if you’re made of glaze. It sinks in past the shine, into the chalk that is my bone. Every touch is a season inside me. Every season has weather.

One little girl pressed her cheek to the glass and whispered, “Please.” Her mother said no. Someone else said yes, years later.

The day I left the glass room, I rode in a brown bag with a hole in one corner that let me watch the world pass upside down and fast. I smelled coffee, dog, rain on asphalt, the dry-coal scent of hot car vents. The bag thumped my cheek. I took note. I was handled with one hand, like a tool, not two, like a baby. I learned something then: people tell you if they love you by how they carry your weight.

I arrived in a house with a green couch. The couch had coins in it, and a crust of something sweet under one cushion; I watched the girl dig for it and lick it from her thumb. She was my girl. I do not know her name from then; names come later, when they say them as if they matter. But I knew her by her choices: she cleaned around me first, placed me where the sun could find my face, unwound a ribbon to tie around my neck like a medal. She pressed me to her chest and her heartbeat thudded into my porcelain in a rhythm that made the room softer. Love is a percussion. Its echo lasts.

They put me on a shelf above the bed. “Too high,” the man said. “Heavy.” He was tall and wore a ring that chopped sunlight when he moved. His touch left nothing in me. He was not all the way there even when he stood in the doorway pretending to be.

“It’s fine,” the mother said. “She’s fine.”

You learn cadence, too. Mothers say everything twice: the words and the worry under them. Fine. Fine.

The girl spoke directly to me. Anyone who has been an object learns to recognize this rare courtesy. She read me books at night. She told me secrets she could not keep in her throat. She introduced me to her other creatures—stuffed fox with one glass eye, a bead-and-wire mouse, a herd of plastic horses that smelled like peppermint because she tested her toothpaste on them. I do not move when I am watched. But the fox would tilt his ear after she slept and the mouse would look at me boldly. None of them can move, either, but they acted as if they could. They were young.

The first time I moved for the girl, it was because the dark was cruel.

They had turned the nightlight off to teach her “bravery.” Courage is a thing adults demand from the bodies that cannot refuse. The man made a joke about electricity bills and the mother laughed in the same key as crying. The dark collapsed the room to a single idea: bed. Everything outside the bed’s edge went cold and toothy. She lay with her hands on the blanket like a corpse who has instructions. She whispered, “Please?”

I waited for the room to blink—a car went by, light swept across the window, the ceiling swallowed and released it. Between the sweep and the swallow I slid. Not far. Three inches forward on my shelf, a skritch like a fingernail down a chalkboard, quick enough to hide under the tire-noise rolling away. I turned my head one click so that the shape of me in the dark suggested company.

The change made the room different. Not safe. Less cruel. She slept. I kept my eyes open. I always do.

It became our game. She would wake the shelf with a tremor of her toe against the bedframe, a signal like the tiny, involuntary kick a dreamer gives when falling. When the house glanced away, I would shift—six inches, a tilt, my chin down so I looked less at her and more toward the door. I let the door fear me on her behalf.

Games like this do not stay secret. The man laughed when he found me on the windowsill, when he remembered he’d left me on the shelf. He called it “creepy.” He said it like he liked the word in his mouth, rolling it around with his tongue. Creepy. I learned another rule: men in houses enjoy being just a little bit afraid. It makes them feel alone in a way that flatters them.

He began to use me.

When she misbehaved, he shoved her into the closet with me. “Rot with your sister,” he said through the wood. She shook in my arms. I pressed my weight into her palms. She thought it comfort. She didn’t know I was also her keeper.

Other nights he sat her in a chair, set me on the shelf across from her. “See? She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t move. Why can’t you be still like her?” His slap landed quick when she flinched.

He ripped her paper crown, spat on it. “Queens don’t live here. Just dolls.”

Sometimes he dangled me by the hair, threatened to smash me. Every time he raised his arm, I tilted. Just enough to make him pause.

Then I began to follow him.

He woke to find me on his pillow. Found me upright in the bathroom sink. He accused her, slapped her when she denied it.

At night he heard whispers from the closet—her voice begging please—but she slept in bed. He tore the door open. Only I was there, watching.

Dust thickened around him. It clung to his chair, his glass, his lungs. He coughed blood. He cursed the house.

His punishments grew worse. Barefoot in the cold hall, kneeling until her knees bruised. “She’s turning into that doll,” he spat at the mother. He was not wrong.

The night it was decided, he came home drunk, belt in hand. The mother tried to stop him. He struck her down.

He staggered toward the stairs. “Gonna teach you to sit still. Like your creepy little toy.”

She stood at the top, clutching me. Please, she whispered.

The rug curled. His foot caught. The railing splintered, stabbing into his palm. Blood striped the banister.

The fourth stair collapsed. His shin broke through, bone white, blood hot. He screamed.

The rug coiled his ankle, yanked him back. He clawed at the wall. Nails peeled away. Dust rained into his mouth. He gagged, vomited blood. Still he crawled upward.

The railing broke fully. A jagged spear drove through his throat, pinning him. His eyes bulged. His legs twitched.

“Baby,” he choked. “Daddy’s…sorry—”

The basement shadows rose, black and patient. They wrapped his ankles and dragged. Bones snapped, throat tore wider, until he lay broken at the bottom.

The house sighed. The shadows fed.

Red and blue lights washed the walls. Boots pounded the floor. Words like accident and fall floated, too small for the blood on the stairs.

The girl clutched me, crown crooked, eyes wide. No one asked what she had seen. Silence is easier to file.

The tidy-haired woman came. “We’ll take care of you,” she lied.

They sent her into foster care. Suitcase packed in minutes. Strangers’ beds, bleach-scented sheets, other children’s ghosts. She carried me everywhere, holding me tighter each time.

And I listened. I always listen.

Years pass.

I count them in blinks.

She grows. I grow with her.

A boy shoves her in the mud. His arm snaps on the jungle gym. Accident.

A teacher mocks her in front of the class. He is found choking on dust in his empty room, teeth cracked.

A boyfriend raises his hand. He is found in an alley, face carved in lines like porcelain.

A stranger follows her at night. He doesn’t leave whole.

Each time she whispers thanks. Each time I answer: Always.

But thanks eventually curdles into something else.

She sits on her bed, hands trembling. “I never asked you to do it,” she whispers.

I press against her palm, heavy as stone. You owe me.

Her throat closes around silence. She knows it is true. Without me, the father would still breathe. Without me, she would have been broken long ago.

She tries to make friends. They do not last. She tries to let someone close. They leave limping, bruised, or bleeding. No one touches her without my permission.

She belongs to me now, as surely as I once belonged to shelves and closets and women with shaking hands. But I am not glass anymore. I am keeper, guard, and warden.

In the mirror, there is only one girl. But she never walks alone.

You call it prison, I tell her with silence. I call it sanctuary.

And she will never be free of me.