Cherry-Flavored Mommy Issues

The baby doll was marketed for her appetite. She always ate up all her cherries. The trick was a magic spoon. Her mouth wasn’t really a hole. The cherries never went down her throat. The magic was a spring-loaded mechanism in the handle of the spoon. A row of three cherries, like a pink caterpillar, appeared and disappeared at the end of the spoon. When the cherries touched the baby doll’s lips they retracted inside the spoon’s handle like a scarf up a magician’s sleeve.

The mouth was a hole that wasn’t really a hole. The baby doll could eat the cherries that never went down her throat forever. The game of the toy is an appetite that threatens oblivion. A baby doll who’s always hungry.

The cherries smelled. The cherries smelled so good, you could never get enough of the cherry smell. Over and over again, you put the jar of fake plastic cherries up to your nose and breathed in. You sniffed and sniffed like it was a drug. The smell never faded. You can still remember the exact sweet artificial note. Potent like floor cleaner. Fruity-like lip smacker. Your first gourmand.

Like the baby doll, you could never get enough of the cherries. Smelling them only made you want to smell them more. The mommy wants more and the baby doll wants more. Your mommy is the baby doll and you are your mommy. You want so much it hurts. The smell of the cherries breaks your heart. You feel betrayed by never having enough. A gaping wound in your heart swallows you up. You blame your mommy because you see inside her the same hole. You don’t want to be your mommy but this baby doll always wants more cherries. You’re never going to have enough, so you’re just like your mommy. The baby doll will hate you.

Smelling the cherries, you forget for a second about how the baby doll hates you. You forget about how your mommy is a gaping hole. You forget how you are the mommy and the baby doll at the same time. The perfect fake pink of the cherries eclipses everything. It’s nothing like real cherries, always bruised and bleeding dark juices, almost overripe. The essence of pink plastic is an unchanging horizon line. The cherry smell is like Benadryl for a broken heart. Briefly you are warm and numb. But the calm passes, like storm clouds moving through the sky. The craving for cherries comes back like puppies scratching at a door. You are the baby doll. You always want more.