The reduced staff at Willowbee fell into an efficient routine with the arrival of their first guests. Cornelia maintained the sleeping subjects – changing nightgowns, sponge bathing, fitting bedclothes and bows of her slumbering beauties. Inert, most of the day, it was easy to think of her charges as inhuman and dolls. Even with the whimpering and screams, the rote nature of their sounds lent an automated quality to it as if the dolls were equipped with an internal music box of tragic sounds untethered to any human feeling.
It was only when the two subjects stirred, seeking sustenance, accompaniment to the water closet, trembling limbs dependent, did Cornelia feel guilt. For it was after these trips, these small steps towards sentience, she would pour the requisite ratio of laudanum to milk inside a porcelain wreathed teacup to return them to the nightmare world. The Doctor taught her the dosage, the shade of pink it colored the milk against the mint green of the cup that would settle a subject into their disturbed sleep. Cornelia certainly believed in the mission and in her beloved Bram -- the Doctor --, and would serve him without fail, but even he referenced the “necessary misery” of cortisol production.
If Cornelia believed in the necessary part, she also accepted the truth that it was a misery. Mabel and Madison, the names she proffered to her two new dolls, deserved not the misery she delivered to them like an innocent tea party, helped to their lips. One couldn’t expect the Doctor to wander down from the lab to handle such menial tasks when he had the cure of a dread disease within his reach.
The Doctor needed to make precise studies of the mice and handle their injections with professionalism in a time-sensitive manner. At some point, he would graduate to a human host, diseased of the supra-renal capsules, upon which to experiment, but only after he had documented long-term success with the mice. Bram, after all, wasn’t a recognized doctor by any medical association and barely even a man having reached his majority this year. Yet, to the girl who had known him since she had come to this house as a scullery maid, the Doctor was a genius and a god who deigned to treat her as an equal.
Since the very first day she had come to Willowbee, the Doctor, a child younger than herself, a noble, explained all of this to Cornelia at length. It was clear to the young servant that her opinion and comfort with each of these protocols was essential to the Doctor executing this plan. She gave her word she would follow each procedure as if it were her own life that depended on it, and she meant to honor that. Even looking at the sickly pallor of Madison, the brunette whose rosy cheeks faded within the first couple of days of her involuntary arrival at Willowbee, whose sparkling eyes brimmed with perpetual tears, she helped the small cup to the girl’s chattering teeth and even managed, “There, there, that’s right,” as the girl swallowed, then curled supine to her doll-like form on a bed, the same shade of rose her cheeks shone only days ago in freedom, and wept herself back to sleep.
Kristin Garth (she/her) is a Pushcart, Best of the Net & Rhysling nominated sonnet stalker. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna and more. She is the author of seventeen books of poetry including Pink Plastic House (Maverick Duck Press), Crow Carriage (The Hedgehog Poetry Press), Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream (TwistiT Press), The Meadow (APEP Publications) and Golden Ticket from Roaring Junior Press. She is the founder of Pink Plastic House, a tiny journal and co-founder of Performance Anxiety, an online poetry reading series. Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her website kristingarth.com.