Doll's House

It was like they were made for each other. From the moment he first entered the room they knew. Him: a young fitness coach with winning smile and a body tanned and toned to perfection. Her: an alluring older woman with Bambi blue eyes and a baby face to match. Ex-gymnast too – more flexible than girls half her age, with kids all grown up and finding their own wicked ways. They both knew it would happen sooner or later: it was practically inevitable as soon as their eyes met. Neither of them could have stopped it. It was a match made in some kind of heaven: Paul and...

“How do you spell Alaga anyway?”

The author’s cover as impartial third person narrator was blown by her sister’s voice coming up through the attic door. She was drafting a marriage certificate for the couple, putting the license back into licentiousness one might say. Trust her to choose just that moment for a meta-textual interjection.

Her Sunday school teacher would be proud. She'd been worrying a bit recently about what the dolls had been getting up to, in a flurry of cusp-of-pubescent anxiety carefully inculcated via slices of Anglican-hetero-marital propaganda consumed before bedtime with a glass of water. It was a good thing she hadn't worked out what Alaga's kids were up to yet: the author had a sneaking suspicion that Flower Fairies and Biker Mice wasn't exactly what the good Lord had intended, even if her younger brother hadn't yet objected to the partnerships (he wasn't too keen on Poppy eloping with Captain Planet, but that was another story).

She didn’t, of course, choose that moment. It turned out that both the author and her sister were in fact just literary constructs devised by a post-modernist with an ingrown vendetta against naturalism, deconstructing herself in a Cambridge lecture hall in the 'writer'’s imagination, itself a composite of the linguistic and cultural capital bequeathed to her by said Cambridge education, which was of course merely an escape from an Essexist Christian upbringing full of hardcore doll-on-doll action that the authors of Help! I’m Growing Up definitely wouldn’t have approved of.

The author shrugged, caught red-handed, and closed the invisible fourth wall, leaving the dolls locked in pre-coital-sans-genital limbo. Their virtue was maintained by the manufacturer’s instructions. Hers would take a little more work.

Ah well. Back to crucifying Tiny Tears.