Mad Hope Read Free

floor and surveyed the set-up. Her dolls were piled in a heap on an old plastic serving tray her mother had given her, and she had arranged her racing cars in the form of a flower directly opposite the tray. The cars looked like humped metallic insects waiting for something exciting to happen. Something exciting would happen. World Creation. She picked out two of the dolls, laid them out before her, stripped off their clothes and pushed them down, squashing the soft plastic of their tummies.
    â€˜You are now part of the earth,’ she said. Then she scrabbled them up out of the soil, blew on them two times each. ‘Out of thin air,’ she said. ‘Man and woman.’ They began to stir and come to life, pushing their limbs out, yawning excitedly. Then the girl doll walked over to the racing cars/insects and woke them up with a wave of her hand. But next to the racing cars was a flying spindle that sprung up and pricked the girl doll’s palms.
    â€˜Help,’ said the girl doll weakly, ‘I’m bleeding.’
    â€˜We will have to hang you up on the cross,’ said the boy doll. ‘You are a sacrifice. Sorry.’
    â€˜I don’t think so,’ said the girl doll.
    â€˜It doesn’t matter what you think ,’ said the boy doll.
    The girl doll whistled and a silver pony came galloping in from the hinterlands.
    â€˜We have not yet created ponies,’ said the boy doll.
    â€˜I don’t care,’ said the girl doll, and when she touched the pony with her palms her wounds healed and the pony whispered he would hide her at the top of the CN Tower.
    â€˜Goodbye!’ called the girl doll.
    â€˜You can’t leave,’ said the boy doll.
    â€˜You better believe I can,’ said the girl doll.
    Then the boy doll got very angry and said he would punch her in the vagina.
    â€˜BE QUIET OR I WILL PUNCH YOU IN THE VAGINA!’ Brianna shouted.
    And then there was Frances, her face gathering force in the doorway like a thundercloud. ‘ What did you say?’
    â€˜Sorry,’ said Brianna, because sometimes saying sorry got people to stay quiet and smile with their lips closed.
    â€˜Well,’ said Frances. ‘Watch your tongue.’ She picked up one of the racing cars and turned it over carefully in her hand. Then she looked at her watch. ‘Where’s that sister of yours?’
    Alana
    Alana took her sister Brianna to the park, their fingers interlaced in a kind of lock.
    â€˜We’re trying the big-kid swings today, whether you like it or not.’
    â€˜Not,’ said Brianna, and Alana looked at her, impressed, but still hoisted her up onto the black rubber band and gave a tiny push.
    â€˜Too scary,’ Brianna whispered, her voice stolen by the sensation of so much wind whooshing around her midsection.
    â€˜Okay,’ said Alana. ‘Corkscrew, then.’ She began to twist the chains of the swings together. Brianna was silent, holding on.
    Alana looked around. Where this afternoon there had been only fall – trees all lacy with leaves, the night creeping in with the cold, Zoe shifting from foot to foot in her miniskirt, cursing September – there was now something else. He would come, she thought. It was like fate, or, again, a movie. Or he would not come, but only because his mother was sick, or he’d been hit by a car. Then she would help him, be his one and only helper. They would maybe go on a trip together – somewhere with a desert and strange mounded homes. But then she remembered his hand on her skin. She was not skinny. If he’d noticed? Put a little pressure on the pudginess there?
    Brianna looked small, all wound up in there. It didn’t seem so long ago she was a baby, feet curled into themselves like little crullers. She was so easy to love then. There was something about smallness. Even today in homeroom Alana had slipped into a daze at the sight of Zoe’s box of mini butterfly clamps.