That had to be an allegory for something. Wild animals possibly. They scratched her and bit her and dragged her into the earth.
She pictured the smear of red blood left on the ground where the girl had stood. The gray figures with Xs across their mouths, dragging the girl’s puppet beneath the stage.
On-screen, the line of jagged static ran through her mother’s face, quivering faintly even though the image was paused.
She pressed Eject on the VCR. The tape grated through the opening. Its yellowed sticker and red writing seemed alive in the light of the static.
The tape had been made for her, which meant the girl in the smock with the brown wool hair was supposed to represent Margot. That alone would have been enormous work to sew. More effort than someone would go to for a child they didn’t want.
Her parents hadn’t given her puppet a mouth. Maybe they hadn’t wanted her to look happy while she was being torn apart by the gray figures.
Margot moved to lift the tape out, to slide it into a sleeve where it would be protected, but then, instead, pushed it back inside the player. She took up the remote and rewound the video. It was short; it took less than fifteen seconds to reach the start. Then she sat back, her knees pulled up to her chest, as she set it to play again.
She’d seen photos of her parents. But this was the first time she could remember hearing either of their voices. As her mother’s bubbled, distorted words began, a lump formed in Margot’s throat.
“There once was a little girl,” she recited alongside her mother, and it occurred to her that at one time, she may have known this tape’s script by heart. She wondered if this was how she’d sat when she watched it: knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around them, so close to the TV that the light hurt her eyes.
She watched the doll frolic across the grass during the daylight. Then the stage’s light dimmed and turned blue as night set in, the gray figures emerging from the forest-filled side of the screen.
She didn’t want to watch the last part again—the girl being killed and the man’s finger painting a smear of blood across the grass—but she found herself riveted, unable to look away, until the camera had finished panning back from the curtains and the screen cut to black.
For a moment Margot sat in the cold and the dark, staring into the empty static. Then she rewound the tape to the beginning and set it to play once more.