The Porcelain Guest

The summer I turned seven, my family moved to a dusty town on the edge of a salt flat. The house we rented was a rambling Victorian with peeling wallpaper and a cellar that breathed cold air even in July. At a roadside flea market, I found her: a porcelain doll with cracked lips and eyes that seemed to follow the light. Her dress was stained with something brown at the hem, and her hair was real, tangled and the color of weak tea. My mother tried to steer me away, but I was already holding her, and the moment my fingers closed around her, a warmth seeped into my palm, like a hand returned. I called her Clara, after a girl I once knew in a dream.

Clara became my shadow. She sat beside me at meals, propped up in the highchair my mother had stored away. She slept in the crook of my arm, her cheek against mine. I whispered to her all day, secrets and wishes, and I could swear that sometimes, just at the edge of hearing, she whispered back. My only true wish was that she could be real, a friend who would hold my hand and laugh with me, not just sit there with her painted smile. On the night of the first moonless sky, I clutched her to my chest and begged the universe, ‘Please, make her alive. Make her my friend.’

I woke to a cold bed. Clara was gone. A panic like a wasp stung my chest. I tore through the sheets, scrambled to the floor, and found her in the old toy chest at the foot of my bed, tucked under a pile of neglected rag dolls. Her face was turned away from me, and when I picked her up, she felt heavier, as if filled with something. I was still groggy, so I crawled back into bed and laid her beside me, pulling the blanket over us both. I closed my eyes, trying to settle back into sleep, when I felt something on my leg. A tiny, insistent touch, rubbing up and down. My eyes flew open. Clara’s head had turned. Her porcelain face was now angled toward me, and her lips, usually a flat, painted line, were curved into a smile that reached her glass eyes. The smile was too wide, and it didn’t move. But the hand that was touching my leg was not porcelain. It was soft, with tiny fingers, clutching the fabric of my pajamas.

I tried to scream, but my voice was a dry croak. Clara’s free hand reached up and placed a finger over her lips, a silent ‘shh’. Her glass eyes, I saw now, were not glass but the yellowed whites of a real eye, with a pupil the size of a pinprick. The warmth from her hand on my leg spread, and with it came a wave of drowsiness that pulled my eyelids down like cloth. Through the fog, I heard her voice in my head, not out loud, but a clear, childlike whisper. ‘You wished for me to be real,’ she said. ‘Now I am. And I will never leave you.’

Days blurred into a fevered haze. Clara was always with me, her hand often in mine, her face perpetually turned toward me no matter where I placed her. She whispered to me constantly, telling me about her own mother, a woman who had buried her alive in a garden to keep her from growing up. ‘She loved me too much,’ Clara said, ‘so she made me immortal. Now we’re sisters in that.’ I tried to tell my parents, but when I opened my mouth, a sickly sweet taste coated my tongue, and a vine of words grew in my throat, and I said only, ‘Clara is my best friend.’ They smiled, thinking I was just playing my imagination.

One afternoon, I looked into the old mirror in the hallway and saw my own reflection. My skin had taken on a waxy sheen, and my eyes, once brown, were now the same pale yellow as Clara’s. My hair had begun to fall out in clumps, and when I turned my head, I could hear a faint, grinding sound, like china rubbing against china. Clara’s hand was on my shoulder, and her reflection in the mirror was as clear as mine. She leaned her porcelain face close to my ear, and her breath was the smell of damp earth and old flowers. ‘Now you’ll stay with me,’ she said. ‘We’ll be sisters forever. Just as I wished.’

I understood then: the doll had not become real. I had become unreal. The wish was still being fulfilled, but in the only way Clara could comprehend. She had been a lonely, cursed thing, and I had offered her a space in my arms, and she took it as an invitation to take my place in the world of the living. My parents would find a porcelain doll in my bed, but when they held it, it would be warm. And they would love it, because it would love them back with a desperate, clinging love. And they would never know that somewhere in the dusty house, a girl with china skin and glass eyes sits in a corner, whispering to the other dolls, waiting for the next child to make a wish.

Now I am the one who watches the road before the house, as the salt flat shimmer turns to silver under the moon. The family that moves in after us will have a daughter, I know. I will see her in the window, and she will be holding a doll, much like the one I once held. And I will smile, with my perfect, painted lips, and I will whisper through the glass, ‘I will be your friend. Just make a wish.’ And I will feel the warmth in my chest, a hunger, the need for a new sister, because Clara showed me there is no end to the love of a lonely thing, if you only pour yourself into it.