"Three Years Without" by Winona Morris

Three Years Without

by Winona Morris

They had gone three years without celebrating Christmas.

The glow of colorful lights leaking into her room from the hallway shouldn't be there.  Neither should the smell of pine.

The lights and the smell were both there anyway.

At first Sarah thought she was dreaming, but the glow was still there when she sat up in bed.

Her husband, Mark, stirred beside her mumbling something still half asleep, but she was already sliding out of bed, bare feet cold on the hardwood floor.

There was a tree in their living room.  It was small, no taller than her waist. It was a real tree, and fresh too. Its needles gleamed with sap, and a faint frost clung to the branches.

There was a box underneath it.

A light blue box decorated with silver stars, it looked exactly like one she’d gotten for her baby shower, three years ago.

Her husband came up behind her, tightening his robe. “What the hell is that?” He could have been talking about the tree, or the box, or any of a dozen other things, but her answer was the same no matter the question.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

Three years without a tree. Three years avoiding this exact morning. Three years trying not to see the empty space where a child should have stood.

Her fingers trembled as she lifted the lid.

Inside lay a doll. It was one of those hyper-real newborns with silicone skin; and this one’s glassy eyes were painfully familiar. Its tiny hands curled on its perfect and unmoving chest. She held her own breath in response, assaulted by the painful memory of another unmoving chest

A whisper drifted through the room.

Momma.

She jerked back. “Did you hear—?”

“No,” her husband replied too quickly.

She reached into the box despite herself. The doll was cold. Not cold like plastic, but cold like a corpse, like a tiny body that should be warm but had forgotten the importance of heat the same way it had forgotten the importance of breathing.

The tree lights flickered. Something thumped against the nursery door.

That door had gone three years without being opened. There were things still inside. The toys. The rocking chair. The crib.

“Someone broke in,” he said, his voice shaking. “Someone’s messing with us.”

Sarah lifted the doll, gazingly lovingly into those familiar glass eyes.

The tree lights buzzed and flickered. Shadows stirred behind the branches, flitting like birds but with no sound of wings. The temperature plummeted, their breaths fogged..

The doll blinked, soft wet eyes, not glass. Its lips parted with their own tiny puff of fog.

Momma, it whispered, in a voice that couldn't be a trick of memory, because three years ago her son had only been a few weeks old.  Too young to talk. Of him she only remembered his soft, sleepy sigh the night before everything went wrong. You know.

“No,” Sarah breathed. “No, I don’t.”

The nursery door thudded again. 

“Put it down,” Mark said. “Sarah, put it back.”

But she couldn’t. The doll’s face blurred, softened around the edges. The cheeks turned rosy beneath her thumbs. For one impossible moment, she felt a flutter beneath its ribs.

A heartbeat.

“Sarah,” Mark said, terrified. “It’s changing.”

The doll’s skin pulsed, plumping, softening, warming. The stiff legs went limp. The vinyl smell lifted, replaced with the faintest scent of milk and powder.

Cold air swept through the room, and with it came visions that could have either been repressed memories, or secrets whispered into life by a living doll. Or both.

Mark, resigning himself to fatherhood rather than embracing it. Mark, resenting a tiny human smaller than his own forearm.  Mark telling her he would get up with the baby because she was so very tired.  Mark in the nursery with the soft receiving blanket, the swaddled form unable to even squirm.  Mark saying, “Shh-shh-shh” to the baby as it stilled, and to her as he climbed back into bed.

She fixed him with her haunted eyes, and Mark backed away until he hit the wall, shaking. “It’s not real. It’s not!”

“What’s not real, Mark?” she asked.

No longer a doll, the infant opened its eyes. They were black now, deep as well water. Endless.

Its tiny fingers tightened around hers.

You asked for me, unwavering. It whispered. You cried for me. So I came.

“Yes,” Sarah said, smiling wistfully.

And I brought gifts. The baby’s voice was layered now, as if dozens of children whispered through it.

The lights on the tree turned as black as the child’s eyes, and the shadows from its inner branches swarmed the room. Frost crept along the walls, blooming in branching veins. The nursery door swung open, the rocking chair inside as empty as it had been for years, yet nodding back and forth.

A small handprint appeared on the frosted wall. Then another, and another. Rising, clustering, crowding, as if ghostly children pressed against every surface.

“Sarah, we have to get out,” Mark whispered.

Mother and infant turned their heads toward him.

Daddy? Why don't you love me?

Mark flinched. 

Then the shadows surged toward him.

Sarah laughed, hugging tight the baby that lay calmly in her arms, watching as her husband began to come apart like a gift being unwrapped by a dozen eager hands.

The tree toppled over, its needles dead and dry. The house went dark and silent.

Except for the cooing of a newborn and the squeak of the nursery rocker as Sarah nursed her hungry child for the first time in three years.