Doll Coin Bank by Ander Monson

I guess you expect I’ll tell you that she’s sweet, or that she’s not, but I don’t know for sure except to say she’s hollow. Samantha’s the expert on haunted dolls so you could ask her but I don’t think she’d tell you on account of it’s not a doll at all and she has standards. She won’t be trifled with, so you have to be careful around her. All that expertise is accrued at no small risk. It’s technically a coin bank, I think, besides, though why you’d want to throw your money in a little lady is a question I’m not prepared to answer. I want to clarify: I don’t mean there’s nothing inside: there’s something inside but I don’t know what it is. I mean when I put stuff in the little girl doll coin bank thing it disappears. Try it and you’ll see. There’s a lot of stuff I’d love to see disappear, my older sister maybe not least of these, on account of how at this point it’s undeniable that she’s just a drag on my and everyone else’s life, but she wouldn’t fit in the slot. The important stuff never does. Little things will, though. Where do they go is a question I do not know how to answer. They might end up where the monkeys in the bathtub go when they disappear, which is, usually, the carneceria down on 22nd for reasons I could not tell you even if I knew. I didn’t even know they liked meat but I guess they do or they just like the atmosphere, which I have to say on 22nd street is pretty lacking generally. Ask my sister. Can you imagine the kid who had this first, who kept inserting their change into the slot and wondering where it went? They blamed an alcoholic parent for taking it, all those coins saved when they went to bring back something from the store and kept the little bit of change, thinking I’ll need this someday to get the heck out of here, and they slid it in the slot and just forgot. It’s easy enough to do, forget. Nothing just disappears, they would have said. That’s one of the physical laws, inviolate, but I’m here to tell you yes it does, Antoine Lavoisier, what did you know about loss anyway. And after the little narrative betrayals revealed at age 9 about the nonexistence of certain holiday characters you’d come to rely on, at that point you’d have to say some trust was lost. It was hard to say how much or if it mattered. Where did it go? Might as well have stuck it in the slot; you’ll never get it back. So the thing I figured out was that when you wrote a word on it and stuck it in the slot, it also disappeared. This was more powerful and more mysterious and unprovable, really, since one it’s gone it’s gone, and it’s not coming back, even in memory. I must have put a thousand words down there, and they’re all gone. They’re not in the language. They’re not in any language! You don’t know them and I can’t remember them because they vanished too, like languages vanish when the last folks who speak them die and do not pass it on, or rather like if you put those people in the slot, they’d be gone and so would the language. I had the thought once: what if I cracked open the slot to make it bigger so I could fit more down there? I didn’t have the guts to try. What if I when I cracked it or chipped it up everything disappeared, got sucked in there, and we all had to start over evolving on some other less bullshit alcoholic planet? I mean if you buy this thing you can give it a shot, and it’s on you what happens. I don’t want the responsibility any more—I’ve lost too many important things. Or at least I think they were important. I have this feeling that I’ve lost a lot more than I can say and it’s got to be my fault, and I’m sick of it which is why I’m selling it. I’d give it away but Samantha says you can’t gift a haunted thing. The object picks you or you pick it, but either way there’s picking happening. There’s intention. You can’t be given it for free. Conservation of mass and conservation of electricity. You’ll definitely know by now if you’re ready for something like this in your life. Like you’ll know if you need to disappear some things. We all do. Even you. I guess that means if you made it to the end of this sentence your fate is sealed.

Ander Monson is the author of nine books. More at otherelectricities.com