The Porcelain Mother

The doll head had no body. That was the first affront.

It sat — always sat — on the highest shelf in the hallway alcove, where the sun never reached and the wallpaper peeled. It was there when he was born. He remembers this, though the memory is impossible: the cracked white forehead, the perfect flaking lashes, the faint rosiness at the lips. He remembers its hollow sockets before he even knew what eyes were.

His mother called it a keepsake. She said it had been part of something beautiful once, before time and heat and damp attic nights rotted the rest away. She never said why she kept it on display. But if he ever asked — if he dared — her eyes would flick to the dollhead, and she’d say, “Because some things shouldn’t be hidden.”

When he turned ten, he dreamed the doll whispered to him in a voice that stung like cinnamon. He dreamed it asked for hands. Just a little grip, it said, so I can crawl back up. He wet the bed that night and didn’t sleep for three days. When he finally did, the dreams resumed. They always resumed.

The house never changed.

After she died (neatly, precisely, with folded hands and lipstick still wet), he returned only to sort the paperwork and clear the rooms. He told himself this was all that was required—fifteen years estranged, a few polite condolences, and now legal finality. The rooms were brittle with disuse, but not quite dead.

There were only two things he refused to touch: the bedroom (with its lace-curtained crucifix and the faint scent of spoiled perfume) and the alcove shelf.

The doll head was still there. Its hair — human, she always claimed, real hair—had thinned to a few translucent strands. A spider had webbed the left socket. He watched it for five full minutes, waiting for movement. None came.

He tried to leave it.

Tried.

But that night, at his motel, he dreamed of the hallway again, only this time the doll was no longer on the shelf. Something clicked behind him in the dream — a small, sharp jaw unhinging — and he woke up with his hand bleeding. Four tooth-like welts punctured the heel of his palm.

The next morning, without thinking, he went back to the house and brought the doll head with him.

He told himself it was absurd, that it was just to prove something to himself. That there was no force behind this, only a child’s fear, now reduced to farce by age and grief and caffeine withdrawal.

But as he held it — warm, somehow, from the shelf — it seemed to settle into his grip like it had always belonged there. Like it had been waiting.

He placed it gently in his suitcase, as if laying a child into its first and final cradle. That night, he dreamed — not of events, but of conditions. A chamber without angles, filled with a pink, pulsing mist. A voice, not quite his mother’s, but something that had learned her cadence from the inside out, whispered:

“Now you’ll never be alone.”

He woke laughing, though the sound had the rhythm of retching. Something in him had already agreed.

But he didn’t open the suitcase. Not for two days.

And then things began to fray.

At the grocery store, he found himself staring at a woman’s neck for several minutes before she asked him if he was all right. At home, the lights in the kitchen refused to stay on longer than a flicker. The housecat hissed at his bedroom door and refused to come inside.

Then there was the dream again. Only it didn’t feel like a dream. It was too precise. He stood in the hallway, the real hallway, though his mother’s corpse was nailed upright against the wall like a trophy. The doll head was sewn where her head should have been, tilted to one side with an almost coquettish slant. A single phrase repeated from the porcelain mouth:

I made you. I made you. I made you.

He awoke sobbing.

The doll head was on his nightstand.

He lived like this for months. In slow decomposition. He saw faces in windows that weren’t there. The sound of someone crying, very softly, in the pipes. He found his clothes rearranged on the hallway carpet — not strewn, but composed, folded into the vague silhouette of a small, reclining body. Not quite human. Not quite still. Once, he woke to a sickly floral sweetness clinging to his scalp, the odor unmistakable — his mother’s old shampoo.

The doll was never where he left it.

It showed up in the refrigerator.
In the mailbox.
Once, in his sock drawer with a fresh smear of lipstick around its mouth.

He could not throw it away. The one time he tried, he walked back from the dumpster to find it already on his pillow. The sheets were damp, as if someone else had been there, just a moment before.