“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

Everything was foggy; the memory illuminated only by the light of Heaven.

The mother and daughter were sitting under the window of their house, the window panels over the glass, holding up the entire outside world. Entirely foundational. Everything was bright, and the girl lay, tucked under her mother’s arm, as her mother sang.

They weren’t very good singers. If women’s voices resembled bird songs, they sounded like the screeches of crows perched on the laundry line. Their voices were throaty before they leapt up, larger than life, and took flight to the memory-stained sky.

The girl remembered only the ceiling, the softness of her mother’s skin, the smell of spices that clung to her skin. Her mother was now merely a shadow on the wall, a faint brush of a touch, yet she knew her mother was beautiful.

And they sang.

Her mother was a lot of things. She could be cruel; she could make herself into a martyr. At times, she could be really kind. Though her face was a pale oval surrounding it, childlike drawings of kindness appeared occasionally. And also rain clouds. She would wander around, slouched. The girl could remember the thinness of her mother’s mouth, if nothing else, how her voice would go terse. Snippy. She would snap at the girl to go away.

The girl did not understand what she had done wrong or why her mother was always angry. She would scramble around their old cabin inelegantly, half-marching.

“█ █ █ █ █ ,” she snapped one day. “Get away from the water!”

That day, she did.

The girl remembered the water, the day that it happened, though she could not remember what lay beneath it. She recalled how her mother’s voice had cracked across the field like lightning, and how her mother dropped the laundry she was holding, hiking up her skirts and starting to sprint down to the river, and the way █ █ █ █ █ had scrambled backward, her little hands pressed against her chest.

She had done something wrong. She must have done something wrong. That’s why her mother was yelling.

Later, she found her mother sitting beneath the same window where they used to sing. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she was looking out at the garden as though she expected something to come walking through it.

She didn’t understand why her mother was so sad, when her mother hated her so dearly. She made a mistake, and mistakes got punished. She struggled to grasp why the kindness never came again.

She didn’t understand why her mother wouldn’t sing.

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The doll was a birthday gift to the girl from her mother, and now the girl was the doll.

She had played next to the water when she was very small, and slipped and fell in, and so she nestled herself to the toy that had fallen in the mud next to the river, hoping that meant that everything would be okay.

Her hair was a matted rat’s nest bush piled atop her head, the blonde starting to look brown, as though it was copper oxidizing. She looked like Alice, ready to step into Wonderland, with the small discrepancy that her mouth looked like it was about to quirk up in a nervous Cheshire Cat smile. Her dress was purple, not the blue associated with Alice, though Alice’s hair and clothes always shift into different colors depending on who is inking her. Her apron and pantalettes puffed up into white parachute plumes.

And she sat, perfectly still and suspended in a glass case. She was a still life art, her porcelain face bright edges, the light brushing of blush speckled over the top.

And day in and day out she watched. The people that came to see her were an ever-revolving carousel of new faces, and they started to blur together; oil still drying on a canvas that was now smeared by fingerprints, until all that was left was an image out of focus.

She remembered the girls, though, the girls and the women.

They were all beautiful;

bella.

The word echoed in her head like an old refrain.

There was a little girl who had pressed her face against the glass, and Alice wanted to play with her, wanted to move her hand so that she could press her fingers against it, as though it was smooth tile. Instead, all she got was her entire hand twitching as though tapped, and stuffing trying to seep out of her dress. The little girl’s face had lit up, as though it was Christmas next to the old hearth, and she swore to her father that Alice had moved. The girl had jumped up and down. “I’ll see you later!! Let’s be best friends, okay!!” He kept glancing away, impatiently, to the other room.

There was a teenage girl who wore some sort of black something over her lips, and this grey dust in her eyes that reminded her of paint pigment. Her thoughts flowed like water, and she told Not Alice all sorts of helpful things, such as the nature of politics and the punk show that she was going to go see, and how she wished she could leave her with some kandi, but unfortunately not. Eventually, she glanced at the glowing box at her painted fingertips, and she bid her adieu, fleeing into the next room that everyone seemed to flee out of. “Keep on being creepy, bitch, it’s fun!” She told the doll.

There was a student who saw her as a great example of historical fashion, going into every detail in how she fit late 19th-century English fashion choices. The girl dressed like her, her hair tied up like a black bow.

All the faces and memories blurred except for one.

The fraudulent Alice liked her, and her chocolate brown hair and her piercing blue eyes. She was a museum curator.

You see, once a year, Alice was allowed to come out of her cage and was allowed to live a little. That’s what the curator called it; they were having a sleepover together. Alice didn’t know what a sleepover was, but she liked the idea of it; it seemed like fun.

The first time a sleepover happened, the curator took her out of her box, holding her like she was some precious glass present. She smoothed out her hair as though comforting a scared child-- Alice knew that she was, and she was quite confused. She missed the attic she resided in, the wooden walking chair. She liked to rock the chair sometimes, letting it lull her off to sleep. If she could even sleep, her old mother used to tell her to shut up, threatening to smack her orange-knuckled fingers with a ruler. But the curator straightened out her dress, and looked her over with an assessing eye, and her tongue stuck slightly out from the corner. It looked like a rabbit’s tongue, pale pink and impossibly soft, and she wore white.

“I have to check you for mold and dust. I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing as I’m doing it, that way you’re not scared. And if you don’t mind, I’d love to brush your hair.”

And the curator kept her promise.  

She used this soft bristle brush, and Alice wished that she could feel it, that she could preen into the touch like a cat. She stitched her back together from where she tore herself trying to reach out to her best friend-- who she had never seen again, but she knew with certainty that they were still best friends. Sometimes the woman would take off her dress and sit her on the counter so that she could watch as she soaked it in the sink. The first year, the water turned a murky swamp brown, but after that it came back clear.

“I promise that I’ll always take care of you,” the curator woman said. “I really, really promise.”

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Her grandmother was a peculiar woman.

Sometimes the girl and her mother would take the carriage into town, and her grandmother would make paints using berries and whatever cheap pigment she could have haggled down for. Her mother’s mouth would somehow turn into a thinner line, and she would lean against the carriage window with her head in her hand, her eyes shut tight as though she was trying to block out all of the light. Her mother was a temperamental woman, but when she saw █ █ █ █ █ light up, her face would relax, smooth over into something less messy. Her face would soften, the white circle that made up █ █ █ █ █ ‘s memories looking tired, but contented.

She would run into her grandmother’s house-- a small thing nestled in London, but a mansion to a child who had only seen the inside of a cottage-- and her grandmother would rush up to her, her too-long dress scratching against the wood of the ground. She would scoop the three-year-old girl up, kiss her cheeks, and start muttering things in Italian. She called █ █ █ █ █ “Bella.” She said that it meant beautiful.

She loved to describe everything as beautiful, and she always spoke with gusto, like she was a windstorm that was coming through the world. “Che Bella!” she exclaimed when █ █ █ █ █ made paintings, “Ti madre e bella, molto bella!” The girl did not recognize the words now, but somehow she instinctively knew them. Knew them deep in her soul, and they would settle there, like the warmth of a hearth against her skin.

Her grandmother also loved to paint, these sprawling pieces that captured the world outside. Though she just painted the rainy streets of London, and everything was awash with grey. █ █ █ █ █ thought it was because her grandmother was like her, mixing the colors together poorly and leaving only shades of grey, though her mother said that her grandmother was more talented than that. Her grandmother always said that she wanted to paint a beach. That █ █ █ █ █ had sand-colored hair and that she wore an ocean blue dress, and all she would need was a pair of dazzling earrings and █ █ █ █ █ could be the stars that were shining against the water. Her brush bristles were falling apart, frayed and spread out. But she would dip it into the pigments that she mixed, and she would put it onto paper, and watch as the color danced and spread as it was tapped onto the paper. Splintered into the shapes of daisies and carnations, curved into the hips of roses.

“Non, non,” her grandmother would say. “I am shaped too much like a pear. In Italia we covet hourglass shapes, and I am not that. I am not beautiful for an Italian.”

Her grandmother always compared her to the sky, but she was also one with sand-colored hair, and her eyes were as black as night, and glittered twice as much.

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The second year, Alice had ripped another stitch in her cloth body.

An old woman had come up to the box, two hands crossed over a polished cane that looked like the old cabin floors of the house she grew up in. She was beautiful. She had the knowing eyes of the girl with black lipstick-- that’s what it was called, she learned-- but the weariness of the white-faced mother. Alice wanted to reach for her, especially as the old woman started to talk about how the girl reminded her of a doll that she had back in the old days, to two bleary-eyed children who looked positively uninterested in it. The one girl even rolled her eyes and stomped one of her feet.

“I don’t want to look at the creepy doll!” The girl exclaimed.

The doll didn’t take offense to it; she was told to keep being creepy, and with the amount of people who walked near the wall to avoid her, she had to assume that she was very good at her job. She took it very seriously.

The curator took her out of her box again, held her very, very gingerly.  

“Then don’t,” the Curator said, gently lifting Alice from her case. “But isn’t it a shame? She’s got such a lovely face, hasn’t she? And a lovely dress, too. All sorts of lovely things, if you care to look.”

The girl looked at Alice, her eyes darting around with deliberation.

“Isn’t she haunted?”

“Yes, but she is really harmless, I promise.”

The girl seemed to soften, staring at Alice and then pressing her face to the glass, fogging it up as the grandma continued to talk.

Later, the curator took the doll out of her box again, and poked the stuffing back in from where it poked out, and stitched her chest back together.

“It’s alright, baby, there’s nothing that can hurt you now; I’ll make it all better. People can be terribly unkind about things they don’t understand. And people can be terribly unkind to themselves, too. There’s so much beauty in the world. It would be a pity to spend your whole life looking for reasons not to see it. You should look for it. You see so many people every day. Aren’t they all so beautiful?”

She brushed Alice’s hair again.

────────────────────

The curator got older through the years, transforming at every point in the timetable. Her hair went from brown to a brittle grey, looking like dust that had accumulated in a corner and that was going to be blown away. Her eyes went from a brilliant blue to a dull London sky. Her body changed too, and it reminded Alice of her grandmother, the smooth pear shape that she always thought looked lovely.

Che bella.

She tucked Alice’s hair behind her ear, and slowly brushed through it.

“I think I lived a good life,” the curator said. “I was a lot of people; you were too.”

Alice imagined quaking her head at this, but she didn’t want to move, much less break her stitching and force the woman with trembling hands to try and thread a thin needle. She would fumble with the thread and huff and puff, and she would sit there and try and try and try until she got it done.

“No one ever thought to ask you your name.” The woman said, her hands like bones combing through a troublesome knot. “All these years working together…My name is Jane.”

She wished she could open her mouth, past the fake, painted teeth and the slightly agape mouth, and say: “Hello, my name is Alice.”

Alice was a good name, she decided, though she knew it wasn’t her original one.

“You’ve always been good to me,” Jane continued, “But I think this is going to be our last visit together.”

Alice didn’t know what to think of that. She felt a sort of numbness in her cotton, and something that was left of her brain reminded her that this had happened before. Her mother, sitting by the window and refusing to sing.

“I wish that there was more that I could do for you before I leave you here. I was many things to many people, but the issue with being a woman is that people often view you through just one lens. It doesn’t matter what your reasons are. I was so frequently told that I should go into graphic design, even though I was going into science, because I liked graphic design; that must mean I wanted to make it my life. I have a degree in biology. Biology! But I ended up here. I’m glad for it, though.”

She put Alice back in her case, gave her a slight frown.

She was crying, Alice realized, salty tears streaming down her face. She sniffled. Her hair was coming out in chunks, and it was like she was withering before her eyes.

“Don’t miss me.” She says. “Don’t miss me.”

────────────────────

Alice did not expect to see anyone come for her. Perhaps it was irrational. She knew that people would always work there at the tiny museum, and that she would always need to be checked on.

A girl came in, with chocolate brown hair and blue-brown eyes.

“So you’re the one that my mother was always talking about. My name is Nancy, and I’m going to be taking care of you. I brought this thing; maybe you can talk through it...” she gently peeled Alice out of the box. “Mom says you’re pretty docile, but that you can hurt yourself sometimes. What’s your name?”

Alice found herself again. Felt her ghostly body. Outside the doll, for just a moment, the little girl with the white dress, still dripping from the water that she fell in. She reached for the box that Nancy had put down.

“Alice,” Alice said, “‘My’ ‘Name’ ‘Is’ ‘Alice.’”

────────────────────

Just like Jane, Nancy came back year after year. Offered her reassuring words and life advice. She told Alice stories about her mother. And Alice could tell Nancy all about her friends, and all the wonderful women she had met.

Her best friend had come on the weekends.

One of the girls made her a bracelet made with beads with just “Midnights” on it.

People brought her toys for her to play with, including one that she was very fond of that made a clicking noise.

Nancy put them all in her case for her.

And Nancy left the spirit box next to her, so that Alice could talk to all of the women who wanted to talk to her. 

Alice wanted to talk to All of them.