Wind-up Toys
Marigold pulls her mother through the toy store in Golden Ring Mall to the table of tin wind-up toys. They don’t work like they’re supposed to. Her mother watches as she picks up clowns and acrobats and lion tamers and fire eaters and human cannonballs and winds the keys on their backs. Then lets go.
A squeak from the clown’s nose. A puff of smoke from the fire eater’s mouth. A wiggle of the lion tamer’s whip. That’s it.
Marigold throws a tin ringmaster at a dollhouse display near the checkout line, and the refrigerator in the dollhouse kitchen topples over. Marigold kicks the table of circus rings and carousels, and the wind-up toys jump into the air then fall back onto their big tin feet.
Nothing. Kicking doesn’t work when her father does it, either.
Marigold bunches her mother’s coat sleeve in her fists and howls. “Everything’s broke. They’re all broke. Fix them. Fix them now.” She throws a tin strongman with barbells at the dollhouse, and the mother and father dolls fall from the pink sofa onto a painted rug. Then they fall two stories and land on a paper lawn.
The naked baby doll climbs over its crib rail and crawls through the nursery door. Then the baby teeters over the edge of the house, where the fourth wall should be, looking for the mother and father dolls. This is what happens when no one is paying attention. When everyone is busy watching the wind-up toys, even after their springs have reached the breaking point and snapped.
Marigold’s mother sits on the floor next to the table of wind-up toys and pulls her daughter into her lap. Bells tinkle from somewhere in the store, and a child laughs at a man pulling a quarter from his ear.
Marigold feels in her own ear for quarters, but her ear is empty.
A cashier comes from behind the counter to put the dollhouse family back where they belong. He places the mother doll and crawling baby on a bed and the father doll in the driver’s seat of a pink convertible.
Marigold’s mother whispers in her ear, “The father has the circus tickets. Nothing works without the tickets.”
Marigold lies down next to the pink convertible, her nose pressed to the car door, and faces the father, who is the size of her thumb and pays no attention to her. Instead, he stares out the toy store entrance into the wide hallway of the mall, where all the keys and springs and gears really work.
The father grips the pink convertible’s steering wheel like he wants to be somewhere else in a hurry. A circus. Where there are girls in sequins on trick ponies and he is the man with the shiny top hat and big mustache and a whip that snaps.
Marigold has three pennies in her fist. Not a magic quarter, but enough for circus tickets, she’s sure. But when she stretches out her hand to place the money on the pink convertible’s passenger seat, the father swivels his head away from her and adjusts the rear-view mirror. He turns the key in the ignition. Marigold hears the clicking of gears, the engine growling like a lion about to jump through a ring of fire.
The father rests his hand on a dial. After a moment of static and bursts of music and talk-show voices, the dashboard radio settles on calliope music The man lifts his plastic chin and sighs. Not a sad sigh. Her father sighs like this when he pats her head at night and leaves. After her own mother has fallen asleep.
He shifts gears and heads toward the toy store door to the mall. If he has the circus tickets like her mother said, he’s taking them with him. Marigold squeezes the pennies in her fist and clutches a tin trapeze lady to her chest. She whispers to her, “We don’t need his stupid tickets.”
Marigold gets up off the floor and winds the key on the back of the trapeze lady. This time, the spring unwinds as it should. The trapeze lady pulls herself up on her tin bar and swings around the bar, again and again. She rises then lifts her legs straight out in front of her. Her arms don’t tremble. She spins once more and, this time, flies free of the trapeze and lands on the table of toys, unharmed. She bows.
In the dollhouse, the mother doll claps. The naked baby doll pushes the refrigerator back into place and laughs.
Marigold watches the pink convertible drive through the legs of mothers and children. She watches the tin wind-up clowns and acrobats and lion tamers and fire eaters and human cannonballs sigh and unwind. They march on big clown feet and juggle and put their heads in the mouths of lions and eat fire and launch themselves from tin cannons out into the mall into a fountain full of pennies. Marigold winds herself up. This is what happens when no one is watching.
Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of journals, including Quiddity, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Atticus Review, The MacGuffin, The Shore, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Raleigh Review, Ponder, Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Switch, Unbroken, Bacopa Review, and Free State Review.