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“You mean… after all this time… we could have been… friends?”
-
The air between them was stale and unnerving. The small, dainty doll with porcelain skin and red nylon hair. The hulking monster with spider legs and a clown torso. Between them was a table. Too tall for her- too small for him.
“I did not expect you to come.” said the monster first- its voice forged and ebbing between many others.
The doll refused to look at him. Instead, she busied herself with smoothing out her dress.
“Was the trip… pleasant?” the monster tried instead to ask.
“Yes.” she finally said. She couldn’t ignore her own brother for long. It just wasn’t polite.
The silence resumed anyway.
The doll tried to make some use of it, arranging the cookies on the table to better be in reach of the monster. He did not take the offer. The cookies were stale. Even if the cursed things they were would find no difference, the appetite simply failed both of them anyway.
“Prototype…” the doll finally said- almost in a burst. As if she couldn’t hold back the thought anymore. “We can’t do this. I don’t know what Father did to you but-”
She couldn’t finish. Any words she had simply didn’t belong to her.
And the monster knew it.
“You are not him, Poppy.” he said to her. “We are not him.”
The doll nodded. Sad, but sure.
“I wish…” the monster went on- the voices making it hard to tell how thoughtful it was, “That we were a real family. That we were not broken. That he…”
Again, a lack of words stalled the conversation.
But they knew. They understood each other.
Wishing did nothing when everything was broken.