Betty’s Doll

This story is from Atrium’s Spring 2025 magazine, which released April 2025.

There’s a plated-gold doll dressed in silks and in satins

with an ornate pink ribbon tied in her hair,

posed on the highest shelf, adjacent to Teddy-

a fraying brown wad of stuffing and fur.

Dust mites crawl over her burnished skin

and Teddy’s gone blind through years of loose threads.

A bite mark is plastered into his acorn-shaped, felt ear

and each night he ventures to polyester sheets,

engulfed in the scent of vanilla-rose sleeves.

Teddy smells of dried tears, saliva,

exile wounds, and a certain comfort

carried since childhood.

The veteran voyager, sat on an old-wood throne

reciting stories of a gap-toothed girl with glass honey hair.

The doll’s front row seat was then stolen

with a swift eviction to a sharpie-marked, cardboard box,

labeled “Goodwill.”

Torn apart from all she knew,

a pageant smile melted down to nickel,

a crack echoed across her alabaster skin,

and her worth deteriorated into

a neon green price tag marked ten dollars.

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