The Outgrowing
My only dollhouse
dripped with dust
for all the years
I owned it.
Instead, my bedframe
bore the deep grooves
of playtime roughness,
its rounded
sweet-cream beams
bowing up from the floor
to form a castle of pillows
and pillared bridges
where thick-lipped witches
in washcloth cloaks,
loved doe-eyed princes
doused in my father’s cologne;
where my fingers
slipped through
the invisible to touch
gold-paved paths
to forgotten forests,
and the silver warmth
of stardust brick
and ballgowns;
where I couldn’t
outgrow myself.
I’m three months married now,
moved out, moved on,
and my parents are repainting
my attic room with
a half-baked buttermilk hue.
It’s my brother’s now,
and like I picked the pale
spring green they’ll piece away,
this claiming is his right.
And it’s okay
that the soft side
of dawn won’t light
those walls in a
moss-soft glow,
and my bed-frame
is broken down and
boxed in a basement
somewhere
because nobody will
buy its pockmarked
pieces,
but I have to know
where my dolls went,
because if the dolls are gone
there is nothing left of me
in my childhood home
but that dollhouse.
That dollhouse.
There is nothing left of me.
By Paige Winegar Fetzer
Biography:
Paige Winegar Fetzer is an undergraduate student at Weber State University, where she is majoring in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Her work has most recently been published in the Sink Hollow Literary Magazine.