Dolls Like Chucky
“It’s happening,” my aunt texted. “Come here now.”
I got in my car and drove—the roads eerily clear for 8am. No song would suffice for a drive like this, so I listened to a podcast. I liked Call Her Daddy at the time; the host’s blowjob tips were a drastic vibe shift from the long days at the hospice. Her detailed descriptions of “glugging” distracted me from the sticky memory of the dozens of dying I passed in the hall each day. I hated seeing them alone, floating on mechanical beds in the sunlight. Their closed eyes. Their stillness.
Twenty minutes before her soul left her body. The street lights still turned red. Parking was still shitty. Little inconveniences now carried a drastic, existential weight. Your mother can only die once. Fuck up the timing, and that’s it. I still curse myself for not sleeping over the night before, when her Last Rites were given. For not pulling up a chair and keeping watch for her ghost. Instead, I slept in my childhood bedroom, twenty minutes away, haunted by time.
When the time, or space—in the presence of death, there’s hardly a difference—was up and I stepped out of the car, I must have run inside the hospice. I must have signed in at the front desk. I must have waited for the elevator. But I remember none of that. I only remember the moment I stepped in Mom’s room and saw her. It.
Mom was just a body. My aunt, who’d arrived just before me, had placed religious statuettes on the pillow around her head: the Virgin Mary, an angel, a crucifix. It was a halo of iconography, as if to indoctrinate her newly emptied shell into this cult of soulless objects.
Catholics’ small-scale symbols of the divine hold undeniable power. Saints, martyred in gruesome ways, have their suffering immortalized through art: a portrait of Saint Agatha with her breasts chopped off, looking tranquil as she holds her pearly lumps on a plate; Saint Vitus boiled alive in oil, his arms flailing like the ultimate Hallelujah; Saint Sebastian’s eyes set skyward, filled with blue as arrows puncture his ribs. As statues, saints stand strong and whole, no longer defined by their deaths. Stone and marble heal them, giving them bodies to live again. Their spirit is resurrected in the minds of those who view them, no matter where or when. Even if I have no idea which saint I’m looking at, when I stop to light a candle at their altar and gaze up, there’s this sense of endurance. Of transcending past the point of hope. That is, past the point of death.
* * *
A few years before her death, Mom threw me a college graduation party. She had impeccable taste, always finding a balance between whimsy and class. Each table was adorned with an object that represented me: A Phantom of the Opera mask, a typewriter, a stack of books, and finally, a Chucky doll.
I’d always wanted my own Chucky, tempted to buy one whenever I’d go into Hot Topic as a teenager. But the dolls were at least a hundred dollars, and part of me, deep down, still feared him. He was my childhood trauma, the monster in the R-rated movie I snuck when Mom was asleep. My paranoia kept me up at night, waiting for his knee-high shadow to appear beneath my bedroom door. Even if Chucky came to kill me—and that was a big if, I told myself—he still wouldn’t be able to reach the doorknob. But then I remembered a scene where he climbed a kitchen chair to grab a knife from the drawer. Unfortunately for me, Chucky had common sense. So, I came up with the idea to set up a Home Alone-style alarm system to wake myself if he managed to get in. I stacked my Goosebumps books against the door, along with my kid-friendly version of The Bible (a layer of spiritual protection). On top of those, I balanced a jar of coins that would crash if he opened the door, yanking me out of even the deadest of sleep.
But what if it worked? What if it did wake me up, and I did come face to face with that grinning piece of plastic? I had it all planned out. I kept one knife under each side of the mattress so that even if Chucky cornered me, I’d still be able to reach a weapon. Fight back.
I remember the look of horror on Mom’s face when she found the knives while changing my sheets one morning. The thing was, even at eight years old, I knew that my fear of Chucky was illogical. But I felt it anyway. And since the fear was real, so was my response. Mom couldn’t understand that; I couldn’t hope to make her.
“What are you doing with these?” she asked. I could see in her eyes that she’d already conjured up her own answer. She realized then that her child was not an extension of herself, but an unpredictable being in the world. A mystery bordering on violence.
* * *
The thing on the hospice bed was an imposter; it wasn’t my mom. I couldn’t stand to be near it. The little red mole near her eye, which had been practically neon in its vibrance, had turned a dull brown. Later I learned it was because the blood, which gave it its color, stopped circulating beneath it. Life folded itself up in so many unexpected places, making itself known only in absence. I have the same red dot on my back; one day it too will turn to mud.
I went outside and sat on the hospice lawn, searching for signs from the real Mom. Rabbits in the tree line. Clouds spelling her name. I expected to feel her presence now that she was free—now that she’d given reverse birth and gone back into some unseen womb to the place she was before. But all was still. Just like the red street lights and packed parking lot, life went on as normal. I was in the same world, just without her. Soon I went back inside to face her body.
* * *
In Portuguese, it’s common to say O or A before someone’s name, the equivalent of the definitive article “the.” O Joāo, A Elba. But in English, it’s all or nothing: a name or an object. Mom. Eileen. The corpse. The Virgin Mary. The Crucifix. The Angel. All on The Bed.
* * *
When I saw Chucky propped up on the table next to my graduation cake, I screamed with love. Chucky was the guest of honor at that party. I held him in photos, danced with him at the bar, and passed him around my friends who kissed his cheek and slipped sunglasses on him. He was more than a doll that night: He was a bridge my mom crossed for me. He was that dark space in a child a mother can never quite see into—but she can honor it. Leave it unexplored, admired from a distance. Like sacred, hallowed ground.
Later that night, Mom gave a speech. I still watch the recording of it whenever I miss her—this tribute that felt like a resolution to all the miscommunication and misunderstanding. In the video, she stands before a crowd in a flowered dress, the same one we buried her in. Her cheeks are flushed; she smiles through tears, confessing her pride for me as she’d done so many times before. She used to love showing me off on Bring Your Kid to Work Day, leading me around the school she taught at like a mini-me. She was so impressive, so confident speaking before a crowd, beloved at her school like a celebrity. I got high off of the attention as we walked down the hall and the kids shouted, “Ms. Eileen, is that your daughter? She looks just like you!”
The video ends with my younger self walking over, body awkward as a newborn colt, and hugging her. I can see myself relax in her arms while the crowd applauds. In the background of the video, I see a couple friends I’ve since lost touch with; some relatives who’ve died or moved away; and Chucky, sitting in his own chair. Now Chucky stands propped against a trunk in my bedroom, watching me sleep. He protects me from all the normalcy adulthood threatens. He keeps me grounded in small childhood rebellions—in dark thrills and the belief in magic. Magic that brings dolls to life.
* * *
Back inside the hospice room, I ventured to touch Mom’s skin. I expected her to be cold, but this was something different. It was the absence of temperature. I pulled my hand away, ashamed at my fear. The religious statuettes were still arranged, settled in the nook of her neck. Against the white pillow, their eyes popped. They were painted on, unlike Chucky’s marble orbs. Still, there could be that essential thing in them. A soul. If serial killer Charles Lee Ray could possess the Chucky doll, why couldn’t Mary and Jesus do the same with their icons?
I pictured the Mary statuette batting her stringy eyelashes, turning her stiff neck, and beholding Jesus. She’d see her son’s body on the cross, his dying paused in time. What a curse: to wake up at the worst moment of your life. On the verge of death, teetering between person and object. The crucifix was made entirely of wood—Jesus’s body carved from the same material as the torture device he was nailed onto. Maybe the wood would wake up too. Remember what it was like to be a tree.
Free to move, Mary would get up on her tippy toes and gaze over the mountain of my mom’s nose. She’d scale the loose skin of Mom’s eyebrows and slip, landing on her eyelids—the flesh of them stretched like pool tarps in the winter.
“I’m almost there, son!” Mary would say.
“No rush,” Jesus would say. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Meanwhile, the angel in her tissue-paper-thin dress would rise above the scene with her fraying cloth wings, singing a song for a little comic relief. Mom’s menopause version of “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” called “Do Your Boobs Hang Low?” Do your boobs hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?
In this version of events, Mom is still just a body. Whatever doll magic there is didn’t work on her. Maybe it’s for the best. Because there is a difference, after all, between a corpse and a doll. To live is to change, and the body deflates and swarms with critters and sinks into the earth and strengthens graveyard beasts with its nutrients. Dolls just exist, vessels to be filled.
Soon Mary would reach the crucifix on Mom’s other cheek, and Jesus would at last feel his mother’s touch. She’d put her wooden hand on his. The nails holding him down were painted gray to resemble metal. He was one material, despite appearances.
“Mom,” Jesus would say. “What are we?”
“I don’t know,” Mary would say, touching his blood. She’d pull her hand away, dry.
“But I can promise you,” she’d say with tears of rain—rain that once soaked the tree she was carved from: “Whatever we are, my love, we are the same.”
Alexandra Dos Santos (@ginger.stabs) writes speculative memoir, fiction, and screenplays that explore spiritual questions through horror. Her work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Electric Literature, Lithub, Maudlin House, The Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel about a mystic on a mission to get murdered.