How To Sew In The Dark

She stitches together little dolls with bits
and pieces of her inside them, and has bad
dreams about them waking up and not knowing
that they aren’t supposed to be alive. Not that
it would make things better for them if they knew
this information, it would mainly just make things
transparent, which upon further thought could
make things worse.
She keeps a loaded gun by her bedside in case
she’s ever woken up by one who recently sprang
to life, so she can just put it out of its misery.
This has only increased her paranoia
that one has already escaped, and is living in the walls.
She’s convinced she hears them sometimes even though
they are all accounted for and in their proper places, but
they are a part of her since she made them in the first place.
It’s not impossible that they figured out how to sew in the
dark.
She caught one on her staircase, half crushed under a book
it was trying to read, pretending to lay still like it didn’t move
there by itself. It committed to that lie straight until the very
end when she carried it, in a jar, to the fire.
She never made another after that. The responsibility
that comes with creating anything was too much for her
and her magazines and T.V. were much safer.