This little story was originally published in Weird Tales 352, Nov/Dec. 2008, edited by Ann VanderMeer.
How to Play with Dollsby Matthew Cheney
Jenny's father spent a year making a dollhouse for her, a three-storey mansion with four gables and six chimneys and secret passageways and a dumbwaiter and a tiny television that, thanks to a microchip, actually worked. He gave it to her on her seventh birthday. Jenny thanked him and kissed him and told him she had always wanted an asylum for her dolls.
Though he wanted her to make the house into a pleasant place for tea parties and soirees, Jenny's father stayed silent as he watched his daughter restrain her dolls with straightjackets fashioned from toilet paper. He kept his silence as she built prison bars with toothpicks and secured every door with duck tape. But as she placed the dolls into their cells and set a group of them to stare at the television, he could not observe quietly any longer, and so he went to his workshop and reorganized his impressive collection of antique awls, adzes, augers, and axes.
Jenny continued in his absence. She created schedules for the patients, times when they could wander through the halls or make origami birds or rant and rave without reproach, or sleep in the cots she had built out of matchboxes stolen from her late mother's private stash. She had considered appointing some of the dolls to be doctors, but she did not trust them, and so retained all supervisory duties for herself. She did not sleep, for fear that were she not to keep a vigilant watch, the dolls would revolt or, worse, harm themselves. She despaired, though, because none of the patients seemed to be making any progress. Instead, they were all becoming recalcitrant, and they did not want to wander or create anything, they stopped ranting, they let the television slip to a channel of grey static, they slept and slept and slept. Jenny tried extreme measures: water dunking, severe lighting, simulated earthquakes, and even, with a contraption made from spoons and Christmas tree lights, electrocution. Nothing got better, and the dolls might as well have been dead.
After a month, Jenny's father returned from his workshop with delicately-detailed miniature hot air balloons, and as Jenny sat beside her asylum and wept over the helpless despair of the dolls, her father orchestrated clever escapes for the patients, who proved to be masterful balloonists, each and every one. They flew to the paradise of Jenny's bed, where they waited until she returned one night, the asylum having been abandoned, and they embraced her in their tiny arms and sang ancient songs in lost languages while she slept, her face wet with tears from her dreams.
"How to Play with Dolls" by
Matthew Cheney is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
It was a sad day when Ann VanderMeer and the rest of the staff at Weird Tales were fired when the magazine was bought by people who wanted to change the direction away from the great innovations Ann et al. had brought to it and instead return the magazine to publishing, apparently, Lovecraft pastiches. Apparently, Ann and creative director Stephen Segal winning a Hugo for their work wasn't good enough. The new owners wanted, they said, to return the magazine to its roots.
Well, Lovecraft was a thoroughgoing
racist, and apparently those were the roots editor/publisher Marvin Kaye had in mind, although in his mind it's actually
"non-racist". Sure, keep telling yourself that. [
Update:
Weird Tales has taken Marvin Kaye's post down from their website, so the link there doesn't work. However, there's
a Google cache. I'm happy the publisher has apologized, but I'm not a fan of memory holes.]
For now, though, I'm going to follow
Nora's lead and
post my story "How to Play with Dolls" here on the blog. It was published by Ann in
WT 352, and it is one of my proudest publications. But I want it to be free from association with
Weird Tales in its current incarnation.
Update: Completely, totally, and hurriedly stealing some additional links from Shaun Duke:
Given that Revealing Eden would not generally fall under WT's genre purview and that the prose and story are hardly so transcendant as to justify making an exception, it’s impossible to read Kaye’s decision to reprint the first chapter as anything other than a defense of racist writing. It is just barely possible that Foyt may have had the best of intentions and been genuinely taken aback when her book was called out for displaying her unconscious racism. Kaye, however, has no such excuse. This is a calculated statement of scorn for non-white authors and readers and their allies, and it stinks.
Update 2: Weird Tales backpedals.Update 3: Ann VanderMeer resigns as senior contributing editor of the new WT.
I was distraught to learn that
Ann VanderMeer will no longer be the editor of Weird Tales.
During Ann's tenure, first as fiction editor and then as editor-in-chief, the magazine has been more exciting, alive, and contemporary than it had been in at le
You might have heard that Ann VanderMeer was promoted from fiction editor of (the
Hugo Award-winning)
Weird Tales to editor-in-chief. Ann is smart, brilliantly discriminating, down-to-earth, and practical*, so I've been very curious to see what she would do as editor-in-chief.
Well, now we know.
Weird Tales has
a revamped website, for one thing. (Writers should note that with that comes a new
submission portal -- be sure to read the
guidelines before submitting. Payment for fiction has also been raised to 5 cents/word.) And the staff is composed of some great folks in addition to Ann -- the great and glorious Paula Guran is nonfiction editor, the glorious and great Mary Robinette Kowal is art director. Aiding and abetting them are Tessa Kum, Dominik Parisien, and Alan Swirsky as editorial assistants.
I'm tremendously proud to have had
a story in
Weird Tales, a magazine I've been reading since childhood (astute collectors will find a rather embarrassing letter to the editor by someone bearing my byline in a long-ago issue, about which I will say no more), and thrilled to see the magazine seems to really be getting its feets under it for the coming years. The new issue is apparently on its way to us soon, with fiction by N.K. Jemison, J. Robert Lennon, Karin Tidbeck, and more. It's nice to see that the magazine will be back to its regular quarterly schedule, too; it provides less surprise to those of us who subscribe, but still, there's something to be said for the predictability of a schedule...
Speaking of subscriptions, they're still
just $20/year.
*this is not hyperbole. If I wanted to be hyperbolic, I'd say Ann leaps tall buildings in a single bound. That's one of the few amazing feats I have not seen her perform.
Some of you will have already guessed that I'm a BlogWhore TM. Well on one of my daily travels around the internet I discovered the blog of Brandon Bell. Go check it out. Oh, and try not to get BlogEnvy TM because it's one of the best looking blogs I've stumbled across.
I've broken my 'write one short story a month in 2009' rule and my wrists have been duly slapped. I've submitted Shiny Black Hearts to 'Weird Tales' and Dead Sharp Tail to the 'Dead Bait' anthology. I was working on something for 'Space Cops', but it began wandering further and further away from the guidelines so I've put it aside and declared I'm not going to write another short story during January. We'll see how long that lasts.
And Google fact of the day - someone found my blogspot blog by typing 'i hate cate .com'. I'm assuming they mean Miss. Blanchett and not me. Gulp!
Received an acceptance today from Macabre Cadaver for “In the Dumpster King’s Zip Code”. The issue is set to go live November 1st.
And more important news: For a limited time you can grab a free PDF of the July/August issue of Weird Tales.
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What a charming story, Matt! Thanks for posting it.