Disclaimer: In the dimension of imagination, maybe I own The Twilight Zone. In the one lawyers live in, definitely not.


"My name is Talky Tina, and I love you very much!"

Mrs. Streator gave a convulsive gulp, and passed a hand over her forehead. "Oh, please, Christy dear," she said plaintively, "can't you find something else to play with? It's just not appropriate, with these men here to… to gather up your…"

"Oh, it's all right, ma'am," said the undertaker, who had proven to be an incongruously jovial man for his profession. "I've two of that age at home myself, and I'll not begrudge the wee one the consolation of a bonnie doll. If it helps the little lass get through all right, we don't mind a bit of extra noise, do we, lads?"

"You don't understand, Mr. O'Rourke," said Mrs. Streator, her voice perilously close to a whimper. "It isn't the noise. Just having that thing around at all… after what it did…"

"Tina isn't a thing, Mommy," said Christy softly – the first words she had spoken all morning, after nearly an hour spent staring silently at her stepfather's dead body and clutching Talky Tina tight against her chest.

"Of course she isn't," said O'Rourke heartily. "Anyway, no sense in blaming the doll for your husband's stumbling over it, Mrs. Streiter. I'm sure he was a fine man, but even the best of us have to watch our step coming down the stairs in the dead of night; forget that –" he spread his arms expressively "– and who but the good Lord's to be saving you?"

Mrs. Streator's only response was to bury her head in her hands with a soft moan, and O'Rourke, sensing that he might perhaps have been less than perfectly tactful, abruptly turned and berated his two subordinates for taking up so much of a grieving widow's time. Hastily, the men finished their measurements and zipped the body briskly into its carrying bag; once their employer had ensured that Mrs. Streiter knew where to reach him to discuss the funeral arrangements, the three of them carried Erich Streator out to the hearse and drove him away, leaving the women of his household, large and small, alone in the small suburban home.

Christy slipped down from the chair, her arms still folded tightly around her doll. "Mommy, may I go upstairs now?" she said.

Taking the desolate wave of her mother's hand as permission, she turned and stumped up the stairway to her bedroom. At first glance, she might have seemed entirely unaffected by the events of the morning; only a particularly attentive observer could have noticed the self-consciously dutiful set of her little shoulders, and the way she twitched her lips thoughtfully from time to time as though rehearsing a speech.

She went into her bedroom, and shut the door behind her; then she climbed onto her bed, propped Tina up against her pillow, and knelt on the comforter in front of her. She folded her arms over her chest, fixed the doll with her gaze, and spoke in the sternest tone her girlish soprano could manage.

"Tina," she said, "I don't think that was a very nice thing you did."


She remembered how thrilled she had been, that first night, when she had learned that her new doll was literally alive – that it could not only recite canned messages of affection, but move about and speak to her in its own words, and generally be the special secret friend that she'd always dreamed of having. It hadn't occurred to her, until she'd come downstairs that morning to find her stepfather's broken-necked corpse lying cold and stiff on the hallway rug, that there might be some important things about being alive that Tina didn't quite understand.

It made sense, though, when she thought about it. After all, dolls didn't have mommies and daddies of their own, so who was there to tell them what good and bad behavior were? Just the little girls who bought them, really – which meant that it fell to Christy herself to correct Tina's excesses of the preceding night.

"Not very nice at all," she said.

"He hated me," said Tina serenely. "He hated you, Christy. So I hated him."

Christy shook her head. "That's not right, though," she said. "You can't treat people badly just because they did it to you. If you do, that makes you just as bad as they are."

Her mother had said this to her on a similar occasion some years before, and it had struck her as quite profound and unanswerable. Tina, however, seemed less impressed. "The vise didn't think so," she said. "Or the saw, or the blowtorch."

Christy blinked. "What do you mean?"

"In his workshop, last night," said Tina. "He tried to destroy me. But they wouldn't let him."

"Oh," said Christy slowly, and shivered a little. She hadn't realized that her stepfather had had such rottenness inside him, that he would try and kill someone – even someone who wasn't human – just because he didn't like the things she said. Maybe it wasn't really so degrading to hate someone like that – not that she wasn't still sure it was wrong, but the reason she'd given Tina seemed somewhat beside the point all of a sudden. She decided to try a different tack.

"Well, anyway," she said, "even if he was like that to you, you shouldn't hate him. We're supposed to love our enemies; Reverend Enenbach says that's the only way to make the world a better place."

Tina's trademark giggle echoed through the room. "That's silly of him," she said. "What's better about a world with hateful people in it?"

"Well… maybe Daddy would have gotten better someday," Christy offered.

"He's more likely to have gotten worse," said Tina. (With which Christy, as she was uncomfortably aware, wasn't prepared to argue.) "And he was bad enough already. I never met anybody I hated as much as him."

Christy let out a frustrated little huff; this was proving more difficult than she had thought. She remembered what the clerk at Mason's had said, when she was wrapping Tina up for her: "If she loves you that much, that means she always will. Dolls' hearts aren't as big as little girls', you know; they only have room for one feeling about a person."

And, as she thought about that, it occurred to her that there might, after all, be a way to keep Tina on the strait and narrow. It wasn't as good as it could be, but, if it was the best she had…

"Tina," she said slowly, "do you mean it, when you say you love me very much?"

"I always mean what I say, Christy," said Tina.

"Then you don't want to make me sad, do you?"

"Of course not."

"Well, that's what you did when you killed Daddy last night," said Christy. "When my doll kills somebody, even if it's somebody I don't like, it makes me just as sad as if I'd gotten hurt myself."

Tina had to think about that for a moment. "Why?" she said at length, sounding as genuinely bewildered as her unchanging sing-song could manage.

"It just does," said Christy firmly. "My heart's bigger than yours, so I can do things like that. So I want you to promise me, Tina, that from now on, no matter how much you hate somebody, you won't do anything to hurt him. Even if he's mean to me and tries to hurt me, you'll let Mommy and me take care of it the way we want to, and help me just by staying with me and being my special friend. Will you do that for me?"

There was a brief silence; then the clatter of Tina's machinery started up, and her arms began to move back and forth, the way they did when she really wanted to emphasize a point. "My name is Talky Tina," she said, with all the fervor her vocal tape could muster. "And I'd do anything for you."

"Then you promise?" said Christy.

"I promise."

Christy beamed, and snatched up her living doll from the pillow and hugged her tight to her bosom. "Oh, Tina," she whispered, "I love you so much."


She felt Tina's answering embrace against her neck, and tears of happiness came into her eyes. Whatever had happened in the past few days, at that moment everything was right with the world again, and she, Christine Streator, was assuredly the very luckiest girl alive.

"I just hope Mommy takes me to get a new black dress," she murmured idly. "The one I wore to Grandma's funeral made me itch something awful."

"I'm sure she will," said Tina. "We just have to ask her nicely."