All Chapters of Doll Crimes: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

    1  My mother, she’s standing at the counter with her hair shining loose over her shoulder, her eyes just as bright, her smile so wide she can only be oblivious to the lipstick marks on her teeth. She’s laying her change out onto the counter, one coin at a time, placing each down with a sharp, metallic tap on the smooth space between the till and the gum rack. The tapping sound, clear and deliberate behind the dancing wall of her voice, feels like the echo of a giant clock in the background. Ticking down to something. Tap-tap like tick-tock.“Eighty-nine,” she says. Tap-Tick. “Ninety.” Tap-Tock.Beside the rows of coins, stacked up to tens in neat piles, are two crisp bills. Beside the bills are her intended purchases. There are only three—a vanilla-scented lip balm, a box of salted crackers, and a carton of full-cream milk. “One hundred,” she beams. Tap. Tick. “Nearly there.”She’s twenty cents off the total. She’s fumbling in the de

    3  Where we are now, this town has been home for a touch over two weeks. It’s a moderate size suburban square, sprawling, kinda poor but not trash-torn. There’s a water tower up on one of the higher hills, which you can see from almost everywhere around. It doesn’t look so big from a distance, though it must be, or it wouldn’t loom like that. Metal bars and splayed legs. A dome-topped cage held high. The high street isn’t long but it snakes around in sections, hiding the post office behind the supermarket, the library behind the mechanics. I don’t know where the schools are yet—maybe tucked farther back.My mother says this town is a perfect ‘launch pad’. Small, safe. Separate, but connected. It has a coach depot and a train line and a highway running by. It’s a place with many exits. No locked doors. We live like rumors in towns like this. Sketch-book versions of ourselves with scratched-out features and unknown names. Vague address, no

    5  When we get back ‘home’—Susie’s home, more a collection of random furniture and broken knick-knacks crammed within solid walls than it is a ‘home’—my mother shrugs off her jacket and throws it on the kitchen table. I set down the milk, the eggs and lube I carried under my own jacket. I keep the two packs of gum in my back pocket. Those are for me. “We didn’t think to take any bread,” my mother says. She rolls her eyes at me, smiling.Aren’t we silly? that smile says.I sit down at the table and watch her as she moves through the unfamiliar kitchen, checking cupboards and drawers and back shelves. She finds a frying pan, a bottle of sunflower oil. A brick of cheese at the back of the fridge wrapped in grease-paper and mummified to something hard that crumbles to shards when she breaks off a corner.“Parmesan,” she smiles at me. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.She makes us scrambled eggs. Soft yellow lumps spiced with finely grated

    7  The longest we ever stayed put in one place was from when I was a toddler to around age five, six at most. Old enough to remember, but not in any solid kind of way. That place in small-town Carris. Our smallholding on the edge of a rural, mountain-locked valley. If I hear or say the word home, this is what I remember. The house, the driveway, the trees. Like a house in a forest, except for the road. The summer thunderstorms, and the way the roof creaked. The warmth inside, burning out.“Each memory you hold is just a moment that’s already passed,” my mom says. “The only way to be happy in life is to live in the now.”She would look wise saying this if it wasn’t for her smile. Goofy, with squinted eyes and tongue caught between her teeth. It means she’s planning something, about to say something completely different, because really she’s desperate to change the subject.“…and now, I say we go get doughnuts.”“… and now, I say we fin

    9  I don’t know anything about my real dad, but if you can make a woman a father I think maybe Auntie Clem was this for me. She was my mother-father, which still makes me lucky, because not all kids get to have a father, male or female. Not even for a while. Sometimes having one wouldn’t be so good for them anyway. I can say this from being in other kid’s houses. Going through their drawers and cupboards. Sleeping in their beds.A unicorn diary with a lock that popped right open. I didn’t even have to search for the key. Those pages full of looping, curling handwriting, hearts hovering above all the ‘i’s’, spelling out sad words.A plastic Tupperware stashed under a bed, filled with moldy cupcakes and half-opened chocolate slabs, all the edges nibbled at like a night squirrel with clever hands. The word PIGLET taped to the lid, scrawled out in big block letters. Not my box and not my name, but even I felt a little insulted.Once, when