palace of winds

All of Anna’s dolls committed suicide sooner or later. It happened so often that there arose a complex set of rules to govern it, a series of contests, a bi-monthly festival. The attrition rate was enormous because Anna’s mother had little patience for mending, but some of the hardier or more cautious dolls claimed to remember the summer Polly Purple swept the competition for three months running. Some people claimed she’d made a deal with the dog. He did rough her up often enough, but usually she impaled herself on crooked nails or got trapped in doors or, in one brilliant afternoon, slipped free at just the right moment to lose half her hair and a whole inch off her side seam in an escalator accident that shut down mall transportation for over two hours. The porcelain dolls whispered darker stories about assisted suicides, and though no one ever said Laura’s name, everyone remembered the glass-faced princess who fell from her high perch under mysterious circumstances.