Her screams fractured the peace of the shop, one after the other, layers of fear and disgust.

The two boys had been playing jacks and I can still hear the sound of metal against stone as, one by one, the jacks tumbled from the air and struck the floor.

All of us ran toward the source of the cry. The young blond girl. She was standing at the back of the storeroom. Thumb plugging her mouth. Tears streaking her face. A mangy peacock feather boa twisted around her neck.

But I wasn’t looking at her.

She was standing next to a hand-carved toy chest that had been tucked away for as long as I could remember, hidden under piles of moldering fancy dress costumes and surrounded by boxes. Those costumes were now pooled on the floor, as if she had swept them off in her fervor to reach the feather boa. The lid was an open mouth.

No.

I longed to pluck the key from a clockwork mouse and turn back the hours and minutes, to before this moment, this day.

But it was too late.

A ball of dusty candy floss hair, the shape of a body carved from bone and wood, the remote stink of an emptied rubbish bin.

Knees pulled into its rib cage, body folded in half to fit the space. Teeth bared where the skin had retracted over twenty years, pulling tight across the bones of the cheeks.

A leathered stick wearing a wristwatch with the sharp-edged face I knew so well.

The child took one look at my expression, unplugged her thumb and screamed again. That sharp, high sound infected the child next to her, who also began to scream. The sound passed to each child, a contagion. Within eight or nine seconds, all of them were screaming, crying, clutching at one another, pulling at their neighbor’s clothes. Their screams filled all of the empty space inside the shop. Inside me. Filling my ears and my head and fueling my anger. I wanted to shake the silence into them, to hear the snap of their necks. Self-control.

You did not know what to do. You ran amongst them, trying to calm them, to muffle the cries. But I knew it even then. Each intake of breath, each scream, punctured another hole in the life I had built.

“It’s not real.” I forced myself to laugh. “It’s another of my puppets.” I touched the gray hair to show I wasn’t afraid and slammed shut the lid. “It’s just pretend, children.” I said it over and over again until the screams had subsided into gulping sobs and blotchy cheeks, and they had been ushered from the storeroom. I repeated the words until I believed them myself.