The Fifth Doll

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  She took another step and gasped, pulse quickening. Tumbled beyond the portico and landed on her knees as voices assaulted her mind.

  So many years of practice, yet you still milk so slowly. What good are ugly, chapped hands if they can’t be useful?

  No one will ask for your hand. You’re too ugly, too boring.

  Your jaw looks like your father’s.

  What kind of a woman fancies a potter boy, and one she used to tend as a child? What a horrible person you are, a vagrant!

  You’ve ruined a day’s work with your clumsiness!

  You deserve that beating and another one, too.

  You’re useless.

  You’re vile.

  You stupid, stupid girl.

  Images of all her failures flashed before her eyes, memories she had forgotten. Broken ceramics, spilled milk, crooked stitches, misused words. Tears pooled in her eyes, pushed out by cold fingers in her mind. All the bitterness and sorrow she’d swallowed in her twenty-six years of life surfaced at once, and the bleak thoughts wrapped around her like an endless serpent, wickedly familiar.

  She recognized the loudest voice in her head as her own.

  Something in the assaulting darkness registered the grass under her fingers and the sun at the back of her head. She struggled to breathe, blinking wetness from her eyes. More and more of the ugliness bubbled up from deep in her core: You’re a coward. There had been a spider in the barn, and she’d been too scared to go inside. You’re slow. She hadn’t kept up with the others in the glade. You clumsy oaf! She’d spilled dinner over her dress. None of them were her parents’ words. All her own. So many of them. So many.

  It sucked her downward toward the cool grass. She folded over herself, shuddering against the consuming odium—

  “Matrona?”

  A tiny bit of her mind registered the voice. No, Slava, leave me alone.

  You don’t deserve to replace Slava.

  Get up. You’re pathetic. How can anyone stand you?

  “Matrona?”

  Not Slava’s voice. A hand settled on her shoulder, the sensation jarring. Matrona blinked, seeing the grass, wishing only to curl over it and disappear into the earth.

  If only Esfir had lived, then your parents could have a useful daughter.

  The hand shook her. Its mate found her other shoulder. “Matrona, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  She tried to blink back the tears and shadows blurring her vision. Found strength to lift her head.

  Jaska Maysak looked at her.

  Tense energy flooded her back and limbs, quickening her heart, making the criticisms in her skull bounce back and forth with painful speed. Pathetic. Unchaste. Childish.

  Words caught in her throat, and she merely shook her head like a crazed woman, trying to sort out where she was, what she was doing.

  Slava’s house. You look foolish. The dolls. No one wants you here. Three days. Just lie down and die. She needed to get home.

  The hands left, and the shadows pushed inward, pulsing against her forehead. But the grip returned, this time under her arms, hauling her upward. Heat flushed her skin. You’re a disgrace!

  “Matrona.” Jaska’s voice was soft and level. “Can you walk? Are you hurt?”

  “I . . .” She struggled to orient herself, struggled not to lean against the potter. Someone was going to see. Feodor . . . Her head felt full of nails, and a hammer pounded the points deeper with every heaving breath. She winced and pressed a palm between her eyes. “I’m not . . . hurt . . .”

  You should be.

  The Maysaks’ donkey stood on the dirt path, a narrow wagon tied to it.

  A warm breeze—no, Jaska’s sigh—wafted against her hair. “Your parents aren’t going to like this.”

  The ground beneath her gave way, and the brief sensation of falling startled Matrona almost to her senses. Jaska’s strong arms around her shoulders and under her knees sent gooseflesh over her skin. The dark voice inside her pounced—You’re sick—shredding Matrona’s gut with its blades. When he set her down in the wagon, Matrona tried to utter an apology, but she wasn’t sure if it passed her lips.

  Everyone will see you. Feodor will leave you. You’ll be a burden to your parents all their lives, and only Mad Olia Maysak will tolerate your company.

  Foolish, foolish girl.

  Matrona lay on a tear-wet pillow and could barely remember how she’d gotten to her own bed. Her body was made of lead, save for the soft spots of her joints and head where nails pounded and pounded, never set. Her stomach squirmed and gurgled, and she slept on and off—she knew because her dreams were filled with monsters and twisting black clouds in a deep and unfamiliar sky.

  She started to fight back, but whatever she’d unleashed in Slava’s house was stronger.

  A rag rug has more use than you. Look at you. Pathetic.

  Matrona pushed against it: Leave me alone.

  It didn’t. It turned and came back, showing her even more memories of past mistakes, of embarrassing moments, of failed schoolwork. A trove of them.

  I was young, Matrona shot at it.

  You were stupid, and you still are. Do you ever even try?

  Distantly she heard her parents address her in turn, her mother more often than her father. Fists on the door. Demands for chores, questions about what was wrong. The pressure inside her head made her sweat, and when a steady hand rapped against her bedroom door during the afternoon, Matrona thought someone had finally sent for the doctor.

  The old door opened on creaking hinges, and Roksana’s voice rang through the air. “Matrona? Look at you! Like you’ve been trapped in a pillory under the sun all day.”

  Matrona rubbed her fingers over her temples—they were starting to bruise, she’d done it so many times. Her back ached from her mattress, and she pushed herself upward.

  You don’t deserve her friendship, the persistent voice murmured.

  “What are you doing here?” Matrona asked when the voice repeated itself.

  The mattress shifted when Roksana sat on its edge, setting a bag down beside her. “The children are out of school for the day. Darya Avdovin mentioned you were ill—among other things—and I was concerned that maybe the stress . . .”

  Roksana shrugged; Matrona moaned and buried her face into her pillow.

  Even the children gossip about you. Matrona wasn’t sure if the thought was hers or something brought on by that deplorable doll.

  “And how would Darya know?” Matrona spoke into her pillow, squeezing her eyes shut as a sharp pain shot up her jaw and into her crown. The girl wasn’t yet ten years old.

  “Well, she said her grandmother came by for milk this morning. There wasn’t butter to be had, and your mother complained it was because you’re ill—”

  You leave all the work to your parents. You’ve never pulled your weight, the voice rattled.

  Matrona spoke just to hear something other than the incessant insults. “Roksana.” She pulled back from the pillow. She blinked green-and-blue spots from her vision, and her friend’s frown replaced them. “What would you do if every terrible thing you’d ever said to yourself, even as a child, came back at once?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Roksana’s delicate eyebrows scrunched into nearly flat lines.

  Matrona’s head throbbed, and renewed pressure pushed down on her chest. She took several seconds to breathe deeply, trying to ignore the punishing sensations. “Haven’t you ever seen your reflection and thought, ‘Oh, I look homely today,’ or perhaps reprimanded yourself from some small wrong you did as a student or a teacher?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose.”

  “They’re such little thoughts”—Matrona winced, fingers returning to her temples—“often passing as quickly as they came, or after a good night’s rest. Only, imagine if all those thoughts were . . . I don’t know, saved in a chest. Every single one. And every bad feeling you’ve ever had. Guilt over telling a lie, or shame from doing something wrong. All of it insi
de this chest. And then suddenly you’re in the room with the chest, and it opens, but someone’s jammed the door and you can’t get out—”

  “You’re rambling, Matrona.” Roksana clicked her tongue and resituated her heavy body, trying to get comfortable. “You sound almost poetic, in a sad, strange way.”

  “Just imagine it, Roksana!” Matrona cried, her hands jerking away from her temples and slamming fists into her pillow, making her friend jump. “Imagine how it would make you feel. What would you do, trapped with all of it around you?” Tears wet her eyes, and she blinked rapidly to banish them, her eyes still sore from the night’s weeping. “Tell me what to do.”

  Roksana’s frown deepened, and she stood from the bed, returning her bag to her shoulder. “You’re not trapped in a room with some devil’s chest.” The distance in her voice made Matrona’s stomach squeeze, made a harmony of voices in her head sing, Stupid, stupid, stupid. “What’s wrong with you lately? First you embarrass yourself, and Feodor, no less, and now you’re wasting away in your room, talking about chests and jammed doors. You sound like Mad Olia Maysak.”

  “I’m not mad,” Matrona spat. She prayed it was true.

  Roksana sighed. “Get some rest, then, and find me when you’re better.” She shrugged and turned about, leaving the room with the door cracked open. Matrona heard Roksana say something to someone in the hallway; then her footsteps faded in the direction of the front door.

  Matrona’s abdomen panged as the cursed doll spell erupted inside her again, bubbling up shame and loathing that could not be assigned to any one happenstance or memory. She curled over her pillow, swallowing, trying not to sick up, again.

  Her door opened with enough force to bang into the wall behind it, and her mother said, “There’s a bath ready for you in my room; go get into it and clean yourself up. Your father just returned from his errands and said Feodor means to see you, and I’ll not have you looking like this after all the mending we had to do for you!”

  Matrona pressed a clammy palm to her forehead. “Please, Mama, I don’t feel well.”

  “Neither do I, but I’m up and about. Get up before I pull your hair.”

  Stomach clenching, Matrona released her pillow and slid off the bed, shaking her head at the dark whispers in her ears. Once in the hallway, her mother snatched her by the elbow and yanked her into the other bedroom, where she practically ripped off Matrona’s clothes—the same she’d worn to Slava’s home the day before—and dunked her into the basin of river-cold water.

  Matrona gasped, the shock of the cold clearing her head. “It’s not warm,” she gasped, more air than voice.

  “Only because you dallied,” her mother snapped, shoving Matrona’s head forward and dragging lye over her neck. “Can you wash up, or must I do that, too?”

  Matrona reached up a trembling hand and took the lye. Her mother left, slamming the bedroom door behind her.

  “You must resolve this.” Feodor paced the length of the front room, moving back and forth before the brick oven, his hands clasped behind his back. His shirt was wrinkled around the waist and elbows. The evening sun trickled through a window, casting the shadow of the half-open shutter over the floor. Matrona’s parents were in the pasture, milking the cows.

  “I have been very patient with you,” Feodor continued, glancing Matrona’s way as he walked back and forth, back and forth. Matrona felt the glance more than she saw it. Feodor had been pacing for nearly half an hour, lecturing her thoroughly enough that his disapproving voice had replaced the mocking one inside her head. It left her body limp and heavy, as though ink flowed through her veins, instead of blood, smudging her insides with darkness. He’d begun to repeat himself, and Matrona’s tongue was too heavy to ask him to stop. He continued, “I don’t understand the enigma you’ve become this week, Matrona. For heaven’s sake, I thought we were past this.”

  Unseen cords wrapped around Matrona’s shoulders and tried to pull her toward the ground. She fought against them. Though a full day had passed since her last visit to Slava’s house, the urge to curl up into a ball and let the earth suck her up had not lessened. Her head continued to ache—more so if she focused on it—and the dismal thoughts running through her brain had long since begun to repeat themselves, much as Feodor was doing now.

  The comparison made her stomach turn, but perhaps that was just hunger. This bizarre depression had consumed her appetite as well.

  “I’ll be well in a couple of days,” Matrona murmured, cradling her forehead in her hands. Surely she would recover by Slava’s next deadline, else he could expect nothing from her. The voice inside her attacked again. Is that the kind of posture you choose to take before your future husband? Can you not bear it and smile for his sake?

  She bit the inside of her cheek and shot back, Can he not bear a smile for mine?

  She tried to straighten, to pull up the corners of her mouth, but they were so heavy, and the effort made her bones throb.

  Feodor’s footsteps paused. “Stop this now, Matrona.”

  The order ran down the back of her neck like sharpened fingernails. She gritted her teeth. “I am trying. I am merely not well.”

  Feodor’s toe tapped against the floorboards, and the echo carried in the silence of the room. “I’ll send for the doctor.”

  And then Feodor left, too.

  Matrona dragged herself back to her bed and lay there, trying to sleep. But while the desperation stretching inside her made her weary, it also kept her alert. She tried to let it roll over her, water off a lark’s feathers, but the effort made her body ache all the more.

  Her father came in at some point to lecture her, but his voice dropped as pebbles in a bottomless well. He gave up, for Matrona did fall asleep, and by the time she awoke to twilight, her father was gone.

  Feodor did summon the doctor to the Vitsins’, which Matrona might have found endearing were she in a sound state of mind. And she tried to appear sound, for fear that the doctor would declare her mad. Maybe she was mad.

  The doctor checked her for ailments, trying to diagnose hurts that had no physical cause. He claimed her in good health, so with heavy hands Matrona tied an apron about her neck and waist and forced herself outside. If the sunshine would not help, then perhaps work would. She could not let this darkness paralyze her.

  Matrona breathed deeply as she walked to the barn, shivering despite the cloudless day, trying to imagine her skin opening up and drinking in the late-morning light. Her thoughts had calmed, at the very least, leaving her head foggy and lined with cobwebs. The headache pounding behind her eyes persisted. Sitting at the butter churn, Matrona plunged the handle up and down in time to the beat within her throbbing skull, hoping the exercise would unravel the tautness across her shoulders and back.

  It didn’t.

  She churned for a long time, trying to breathe through Slava’s spell, though this morning the smell of the cream turned her stomach. If the hateful voice in her head had ceased its prattling, then soon the rest would wear off as well, yes? Matrona tried to grasp that glimmer of hope. She could pretend to be well until true relief came, and if it did not, she would drag her leaden body to Slava’s and demand an antidote . . . Yet she feared what future torments he had in store for her. Removing the second doll had produced a worse effect than removing the first. This doll attacked her from within, and she still didn’t understand why.

  A knock sounded between beats of the plunger hitting the base of the churn, and Matrona looked up, blinking back shadows and webs to see the person in the doorway. It took her too long to recognize him, and when she did, a sliver from the plunger handle bit into her index finger.

  Jaska.

  She blinked again and rubbed her wrist over her eyes.

  “I’m sorry to intrude.” Jaska’s voice seemed to skim along the sides of her neck. It was pitched lower than Feodor’s, yet not as deep as her father’s. “I tried to come sooner—”

  Matrona dropped her wrist and looked at him as h
e approached. She shook her head, trying to loosen some sense in it. “For . . . for milk? I’m sorry, our production has been . . . low—”

  He offered her an expression that was half-frown, half-smile. “I meant to see you, Matrona. You were so ill, and I hadn’t heard any news of your recovery.” He shrugged. “I’m afraid your mother was not happy to see me either time.”

  Her mind strained like a thorn-caught cricket wing, and she gritted her teeth, forcing it to work faster. Either time? When he dropped her off, and . . . he’d come again? Yesterday?

  She felt a flush creep up her neck, but the voice in her head, the one that had been hounding her since she’d opened that second doll, remained blissfully silent.

  Matrona released the plunger and sat back, moving both hands to the sore muscles of her shoulders. “I’m . . . fine. I will be.”

  “You don’t look well.” Jaska lingered by the worktable. He had a few clay stains on his rolled-up sleeves, but his hands were clean. “Have you seen the doctor?”

  Matrona scoffed. “Yes, I have, and I fear he thinks me dramatic.” She touched a new, pulsing pain in the center of her forehead.

  “You should rest.”

  Matrona shook her head. Maybe she would have laughed, were her lungs not so heavy. “I’ve rested too much.” She tried to remember the time, an impossible task when she could not even recall the day of the week. Wasn’t Slava’s third day tomorrow?

  She couldn’t see Slava. She wouldn’t see him. This humiliation, this torment, these threats—it would be her undoing. Slava couldn’t possibly reprimand her without telling others of the dolls, and they would laugh at him. He would twist her father’s doll, maybe her mother’s . . . but if Matrona acted like she didn’t care, if she played aloof, he would have to set them back to rights. He couldn’t skew every person in the village. Or perhaps she could steal them . . .

  If I go back, he’ll make me open the next doll, she thought, pressing her palms into her eyes. Slava had not used force, yet, but who was to say he would not? It wouldn’t be the first time another had raised a hand against her—