Dollface rocked in the porch chair, chewing on gum from the day's expedition to Dairy Park on the other side of town. She listened to the droning locusts and the peeps of the evening's frogs.
On her finger, a cheap ring Izzy had bought her that morning with the money she'd made selling eggs.
Izzy had chickens.
Izzy liked chickens.
Izzy was proud of her chickens.
Dollface rhythmically rocked, having spent a good chunk of the day either at work or quietly darning socks. In her hands, socks on the round. She wrapped the red yarn around the needle, lifted on, then pulled the loop off, finishing the row.
She repeated after clicking the row counter, staring into the distance, rocking.
The fields in front of the house seemed to expand forever.
She wondered what could be out there.
Dollface's friends rarely seemed interested in that. They liked Elmore, and the outside world seemed silly to lust after.
But Dollface didn't want, she needed something more.
Grampa understood, it was why he was in the Guard, years after the war. Right now, he was out in the jungles, and refused to speak anything of what he saw. Gramma always turned off the television whenever it came up.
It seemed inescapable now.
Michael asked if he could see Dollface's hands, and she obliged. He was mesmerized by how her small hands spidered across the cabled needles with ease, making socks after spending the day repairing them.
Grandpa's hunting rifle was leaning next to her, a box of shells by her feet.
In a small town, something could easily go wrong and turn into a mob. That's what was happening in town to old man Kreuger in the serene golden light of the evening.
Old man Kreuger lived under the bridge by the river, with his grotesque nephew Jason, and lived off of garbage and rats while ranting to himself. Michael hated both of them.
And the town did too, now that decades of misdemeanors had caught up to him.
Krueger's nephew was as big as he was scary. Nobody was home, his head completely vacant. The town doctor at a church banquet one Easter Sunday afternoon when Dollface was very little said that "Jason's head was full of water".
Dollface, six at the time, was very scared that Jason's head would pop like a tick and leave water all over the place and that would be a real mess and it was generally pretty terrifying to think about.
It could, in her young mind, happen to anybody, even her, and because of that, Dollface, who still had a messy mop of dirty blonde hair cut in a blunt-bob by her Gramma, began checking her head in the mirror for swelling.
She grew out of it by age nine, but not before losing some sleep over the whole thing.
Hearing the screams rise as an engine was gunned in the streets above, Dollface rocked, Michael keeping her calm.
Of course that's what'll happen when a little boy full of holes and missing limbs is found dead in the trunk of a car.
Old man Kreuger was an easy target, and easily disposable. He even had a record from before he decided to skip his meds. There had once been a time when he worked at the town's only daycare as gardener and occasional minder of small toddlers before he was driven out when the parents found out what he did to their kids.
This wasn't the first time the town had been overwhelmingly violent, especially towards Old Man Krueger.
But this time would prove to be the last.
Dollface didn't think she'd need to use the gun though, she was too far out of the town to really get involved, and the riot seemed mostly self-contained.
"He's escaping! That rat bastard's escaping!"
Dollface whimpered, hearing the sharpness of even the most muffled yells of an angry mob outside. She recognized what little she could hear as Great Uncle Barney who'd been visiting from the Ozarks, a large man, the brother of Eustace, and her boss at Daisy's.
She never knew the overweight WWII vet who gave neighborhood children fun-sized candy bars and always had bottles of water on his porch for any passersby could do something like this.
Dollface kept her eyes shut and focused on the ever-present shine, and listened to the voice of Michael.
"I think we'll be spendin' time at home this week." Gramma casually said casually, leaning against Dollface's chair.
Forced to a halt and knowing better than to question, Dollface looked up, "What'ta 'bout t'tailor shop, Gramma?"
Gramma absently pushed her grayed hair back into place, having gotten a smelly perm from Izzy's mama, the hairdresser, just a day or two before. Dollface wished Grampa would hurry up and just come home from the war in a distant country called Vee-it-nam already. He was too old to be a sergeant in a burning jungle.
"It's fine, we'll be fine. We'll just stay here for now. Like a vacation." Gramma said, grabbing and shaking Dollface's shoulders, "Y'all ready fer dinner?"
Dollface fought the urge to throw the hand off, disgusted by touch of any kind, something Michale and Grampa understood, "Yeah. Thanks."
She stood and followed Gramma into the house through the screen door, screams left hanging in the air.
Dollface was almost nine that hot afternoon in 1979.
Even back then, she was known as 'the creepy kid'.
She had the darkest eyes in Elmore, and she had the ability to stare and turn things into little neat boxes in her head.
One minute, you were a person, but under her silent gaze, you were a scrutinized object broken into pieces looked at under a microscope.
And these moments were unusual, not for those reasons, but because they seemed to come out of nowhere. She was usually like any other kid, but then would drop everything and become quiet.
She was older than most of her friends, by a year, purposely held back before kindergarten to make sure she wasn't the youngest and was up-to-date on everything, considering her mother's disappearance and certain evaluations of the child's developing mind. The doctor's said she had this thing called 'Aspergers' , something they'd recently learned that little girls who minded their manners could have.
Meaning Dollface was a little more self aware than her peers.
What a nightmare, to be born in limbo.
Too young for the other kids in your class, too old for the ones you were nestled in with.
And by now, like many things, Dollface was used to wandering in and out of dying towns, even at that age, and stood in the abandoned K-12 building in Bethel, Missouri.
She stood in the outer doors of the gymnasium, in the doorways of the hangar-like exits, still. Behind her was the covey of little old ladies in a circle, whispering about yarn and thread and things that bored a child like her, so here she stood, studying the sprawling green overgrowth of the world outside her in the abandoned town.
The night before, they'd stayed at a small Bed and Breakfast run by a toothless old lady with a thick German accent, and Dollface had hidden under her covers until dawn.
No streetlights, just dusty windows and the sounds of an endless expanse as the town slumped in on itself, rotting from the ground up.
Dollface was used to that.
No lights oftentimes in Elmore, no cars, just the train and the highway that had killed her town, but a quiet evil rustled across the street in this strange place and sunk into the dried up and crackled dirt like water in the desert.
Dolfface had heard mention of Bethel being founded as some sort of communist utopia by a pair of crackpot brothers trying to find the holy land. They were so crazy they wouldn't even let married couples fuck, meaning the town had been passed over for generations.
Dollface didn't even know what half of that meant, unusually high vocabulary and literacy scores or not.
The school she stood in was the town's last resort in 1968 to bring in people, generations after the fall of the cult.
She looked down at what was left of the concrete of the modern-made building and saw the dead rat again, between her cheap dollar store sneakers with glued-on rhinestones that had already begun to shed away after nearly a year of wearing.
She was jealous of her cousin, Missy Custer because she always had nice shoes.
Dollface's mouth was dry in the heat of June, sweating heavily.
She had learned very quickly that you didn't come to this town to live or start something.
You came to shrivel up and die.
And this rat had proved her point.
Dollface squinted angrily into the bright blue sky, seeing no clouds but rusting construction equipment silhouetted in black against it from when someone had decided to remodel or even demolish but decided it just wasn't worth the time, money or effort.
So they'd just left the CAT's and other vehicles here.
Feathers flew past her feet, like dead leaves.
She mopped off sweat from her forehead, feeling gross and wishing she could cover up more, but it was shorts or more sweat.
The ever sensitive Dollface chose to not be as moist,even if stuff touching her bare legs was enough to make her claw her skin off.
Panting, Dollface stared at the empty playground equipment. Poorly painted, badly welded, and misshapen. All the 'animals' looked like they would follow her home and hide in her closet.
She decided to take refuge inside the dark building.
Maybe there was an art room.
Of which she found, still stocked with yellowed coloring books and crayons, even hand sanitizer and tissues.
Dollface tried to sit at the dusty tables, but she only felt more uneasy.
The shine behind her eyes was threatening, like a shark ready to eat her.
She idly kicked her legs, trying to ignore it.
Four years ago, Grandpa had gone off to a country full of jungles that had a funny name.
Before that, a place called Korea.
And before that?
Three years ago, Grandpa had gone to a far away country with a funny name full of jungles.
Dollface could feel something slither as sweat beaded and ran down her back.
The shining behind her eyes was sickening, but she brushed it off as heat.
Becoming more nervous, she flipped the page and tried desperately to color in Dyno-Mutt, one of her grandfather's favorite Hannah-Barbera characters.
Scooby-Doo was of course, his favorite, and every Saturday night, they would sit down and watch it while Gramma knitted.
Two years ago, Grampa had been stationed somewhere in a country full of jungles and flew medical helicopters.
Before that, Korea.
And before that….
Dyno-Mutt almost finished, Dollface reached for a red crayon, little brown feathers falling around her feet.
She decided to send this to Grampa when she got home.
So he could have a pretty picture in Vietnam.
Dollface felt an unease rise even further as she finished the red parts of her picture.
She panted, heart thumping in the silence.
The light wavered, hungry.
Now that she thought of it, she didn't know why she was here.
She'd been scooped up in the old car with a cooler of food and after a day of driving around, was sent to bed at the BnB.
Dollface's eardrums rumbled and she sat still, feeling the need to be very quiet.
She slowly reached for the crayons and grabbed purple, slowly pulled it out and shakily put it to paper.
Grampa was in Korea, he needed a pretty picture.
Sweat dropped from her forehead and onto the table, shirt oaked past saturation. She swallowed, hard.
"Dollface!"
Dollface's head shot up, the sickly shine gone and replaced with one she only saw around her uncle Sebbie.
She grinned widely, happy to see him in such a strange place.
"You ready to go to Hannibal?" He asked in his funny accent.
She nodded. "Can we see Grampa b'fore we do? I made him a picture!"
"Of course we can, little wren, he's just down the street meeting with someone."
Four years ago, Grandpa was in a strange country far, far away.
But right now, he was just a few steps away from the school, waiting for a present.
Dollface ripped the page from the coloring book and skipped to uncle Sebbie.
He took her hand and they strolled through the gaping gym doors and into the bright sunlight, past the dead rat.