A Promise to Break

Dolores carefully placed the cup of sugar on the exact center of the pink, frilly table cloth.

“There, Cordelia. Now we can start our tea party!” Dolores picked up a small porcelain jug and poured out two cups of steaming water.

“Now add the teabag.” she did so, and helped Cordelia with hers, because after all, dolls cannot unwrap teabags with the greatest ease.

“So Cordelia, how was the weather at your place?” The girl nodded, listening intently. “Oh my! Snow, really? In August? Oh dearie me.” She gave a trilly laugh that, had it a color, would’ve gone well with the tablecloth.

“Well Cordelia, the weather here was remarkable-“

But there was a sharp rap on the door and a shrill voice bellowed, “Dolores! GET DOWN HERE!”

“Will you excuse me for a moment, Cordelia?” Dolores asked the doll politely, then quickly scooted back her chair and flounced on downstairs. Her mother was waiting in the living room.

“Yes mother?” Dolores batted her eyelashes prettily.

“For god’s sake Dolores, what are you wearing? You look like some prissed-up toad. Take it off.”

The girl frowned looking down at her frilly pink dress.

“I said, take it off! Here-“ the mother roughly grabbed at the dress, pulling it up so hard that it ripped as it came off Dolores’s body.

“There, that’s my little freak of nature. Now explain this.” The woman pointed coldly at a silver stain on the rug.

“Explain what, mother?”

“Explain why my Silver Youth product is on the floor!”

“I don’t know, mother.” Dolores looked up at her mother with wide eyes. “May I have my dress back, please?”

“Liar. You spilled it.”

“I didn’t, Mother!”

“You thought you could be pretty, is that it? You wanted to be pretty like me, so you stole my potion. Do you even know how much it cost me? An arm and a leg and then some, you dirty little pig.”

“Mother. I didn’t!”

“LIAR!”

Dolores’s lip trembled before her mother’s rage.

“The quill.”

“But I didn’t do it!”
“NOW.”

Dolores ran furiously to the kitchen and collected a black feather quill and a piece of parchment. Her mother shoved her into a chair at the kitchen table.

“One hundred lines. I must not tell lies.”

“No! I didn’t do it!” An enraged tear squeezed itself out of the girl’s eye.

“You filthy rat!” Her mother grabbed her by the arm and twisted hard.

“Ow!” Now she was crying in earnest.

“You will write those lines. Now.” She let go, and Dolores, quivering, picked up the quill and slowly wrote, at the very top of the parchment.

I must not tell lies.

The words appeared on the back on her hand, etched there as though with a scalpel.

“When I grow up,” she vowed to herself, “I’m going to throw this quill into the fire and make my mother watch it burn.”