She was still falling into the yawning darkness of the toy-box when a sense of utter wrongness woke her. A second later she hit the ground with a hollow thud, bouncing a few times until finally coming to rest beside a large colorful hunched lump of fabric and hair and string. For a moment she froze, expecting broken bones and torn skin, for the air to have been sucked violently from her lungs as her chest was crushed in the impact. But nothing happened. For a long time, nothing happened. Struggling to get her legs beneath her, she rose, and then pitched forward immediately, unbalanced. Everything was where it should be, and yet everything felt wrong, unfamiliar. Looking down at her legs, she found a beautiful albeit unrecognizable blue stretched across soft, flexible plastic. Plastic? She had never heard the word before and yet she knew what it was, knew it had replaced her skin. She stumbled backwards in the dark, though the shock never made it to the forced stillness of her cartoonish face. Something clattered behind her, but she paid it no attention because the heap of cloth and color suddenly sat up and faced her with its painted on smiling face. It was too much, she thought fleetingly as the fragmented voice stretched out to her in the mostly dark.
“Well! Goooood morning to you too, little one!” The voice seemed impossibly cheerful, perhaps muted a little by the cloth fabric of its face. “I’m Buttons the clown, think you could help me with this string?” Still struggling through resurgences of shock and incredulity, Malis peered through the dark at the large stuffed creature. Puppet. Again the word came unbidden, bringing with it a general understanding of a puppets purpose. When she looked closer yet, she noticed the puppet strings had become an impossible tangle, binding one leg at a gruesome angle behind him, and the other leg to the arm on the same side. The last limb, his right arm, sat in his lap while he wiggled and fidgeted and then finally tipped himself over. She gasped, she hadn’t meant to, but the large toy seemed even larger now sprawled across the floor in a lonely corner of the toy chest. He flopped there a moment before his oddly large eyes turned to her and waited with patient expectation.
She scrambled, slipping on plastic feet across the dusty wood flooring, stepping close enough to put her plastic mouth on the strings and pull as hard as she could. But all that happened was Buttons right arm twitching and then falling sideways across his tipped over chest. “I can’t break the string.” She apologized, surprised by the note of concern coloring her tone. His right hand twitched and lifted as far as the string would allow, and she turned her gaze to where he was pointing. There in the corner lay a heap of pale stone- no, not stone, porcelain. Even from here she could see a few pieces whose edges glinted like jagged blades. “Oh!” She hurried over, already keeping her balance better despite the too smooth edges of her feet and the elephantine thickness of her plastic limbs. She leaned over the pile, flinching as she made sense of the demolished porcelain graveyard. At one point in its life, this had been a beautiful ballerina perched gracefully atop a spinning music box. Now, well loved or loathed, it was impossible to know for sure, all that remained were small piles of chipped and broken pieces, slivers and painted dust. A shudder ran up the length of a spine that no longer seemed to exist beneath a ridiculously luxurious mass of gold and fuchsia mane. Grabbing carefully in her mouth a sharp piece near the edge of the pile, Malis returned to Buttons and dropped it right beside him. “Now what, I don’t have hands like you.”
There was a tap on her withers and she spun quickly, a squeal dying on her lips as she turned to find yet another humanoid creature smiling back at her. “I think I can help with that!” Before Malis could even respond, the doll had grabbed the makeshift porcelain blade and began sawing away the string. She did the best she could to help the doll and the clown, putting tension on the string while Molly, as she would later introduce herself, dragged the edge back and forth, back and forth. When the last string had fallen away and Buttons was finally free, Malis found herself scurrying backwards yet again to give him room to stand. The area they were in was remarkably small so it was unsurprising when Malis knocked into yet another dark object toppled in the shadows. The surprise came when the previously immobile hunk of falling plastic landed with an audible ‘oof’ and then struggled immediately to its feet. “What in the h-“ Malis ground out between gritted teeth, interrupted almost immediately by the clown who had moved close enough to stand beside her. “I think it’s time to stop waking up all the strangers, little one! You won’t find much trouble here in the drawer of broken toys, but it’s a whole different story in The Other Side.” And for the first time Malis imagined that painted face darkened with an expression she was in no rush to understand.
“What do you mean I have to stop waking them up,” she argued defensively, stamping a forefoot impatiently to hide her bubbling nerves, “it was probably the racket of cutting you free that woke them up!” Malis could feel herself bristling even though both the clown and the doll were watching her with smiling impassive faces. Then the new toy pulled itself from out of the shadows and she felt her brow furrowing over eyes narrowed suspiciously- though she couldn’t actually be certain her face had moved at all. It was so impossible to tell.
The third toy was a horse. It was a faded sparkly gold and purple, with a blonde mane so tightly curled that it frizzed unnaturally in several places. The tail was missing, leaving only a strange empty hole where it should have sat. It’s feet were even more strange though. They were made of an almost clear pink plastic, also sparkly, and lit up as the horse approached the trio. A strange tune bled from the horse’s belly, a happy song at one point, now dull and choppy as the batteries died. As they horse came to stand next to the doll, with the clown on its other side, Malis could merely look on gaping. What the heck kind of nightmare was this? She opened her mouth again to speak but Molly beat her to it. “We can’t just wake up! We’re toys! But yoooou seem to be magic.” It was clear by her face that Malis didn’t understand. “We didn’t wake up until you touched us.” Molly added. When still Malis looked doubtful, the doll disappeared for a second only to return with a small orange plastic cat from one of the closer toy mounds. She shook the toy, poked it, dropped it, yelled, but nothing happened. Then she gestured for Malis to touch it. Cautiously, curiously, Malis stretched out her nose to brush it against the cool, smooth orange plastic. As if waking from a nap, the cat stretched luxuriously, yawned, gave everyone a look of utter contempt, and then walked away back into the shadows.
“Oh.” Was all Malis could say as she watched the retreating form of the orange cat. Self-consciously she looked around, now actively trying to make sure she wouldn’t brush against any other toys. “I have to get out of here.” She announced suddenly. The trio of toys looked surprised, and the horse, who appeared to be mute, began slowly shaking its head. “Sorry little one, there isn’t a way out of here.” The clown said, a trace of understanding coloring his tone. “If we had the blocks over here I could probably build a small platform and lift you out, but it would be a very bad idea to bring your magic self over to the Other Side.” Seeing the look of confusion on her face, he continued. “In this room there are many toy boxes. In this specific toy box, there are two parts. This side is where she leaves the broken, old, or unwanted toys. We’re generally a nice bunch, but there are some exceptions. But the toys on the other side of this partition are the unfriendlies. They’re the villains in every game we’ve ever played.” One hand still leaned on the partition that she now realized separated on group of toys from the next. “There is a lid to this box, but it’s in two pieces. One part over our side, one over theirs. She keeps our side latched though because she has no reason to take us out anymore. So the only way out is over this partition and past the unfriendlies.”
Without waiting to give someone a chance to stop her, she found a hole in the partition and wedged herself through. Immediately Buttons face appeared in the hole, his clownish smile tipped upside down with a frown. But before he could stop her, she had stepped carefully away from the hole. “I can’t stay here, I don’t belong here.” And with that she told him her whole story. Her family, her world, the life that was waiting for her. She could see his face changing as she opened her worries to him, until finally his face disappeared from the hole. His hands appeared at the top of the partition as he pulled himself over to stand beside her. “Molly and Sparkle want nothing to do with this, but you helped free me so I will return the favor.” He pledged solemnly. Somehow this side of the box was a little better lit, and she realized suddenly it was because the lid wasn’t pulled so tight here, she could see a crack of light edged all around the top. Looking closer at her new friend, she began to understand what it meant to be a throw-away toy. His red curly hair had been cut in uneven tufts, his face colored on with crayon. There were rips in his clothes, his skin really, where tufts of white fuzz peeked out.
“So what’s the plan.” She asked, her voice tight and uncertain as she peered around at the heaps of toys he had referred to as villains. “See all the blocks in the far corner?” He asked and she nodded because she did. “If I can get you there, you can get the lid propped open so you can climb out.” It seemed like a relatively easy, straightforward plan. It became immediately evident that in the time it would take small Malis to weave around the piles, Buttons could climb over and through them without any fallout. So the pair split up and Buttons went to work immediately on building the staircase platform for Malis. In the meantime, she wove carefully around the piles, noticing things like gaping mouths full of sharp teeth and taloned claws on strangely small arms. None of it meant anything to her, but she knew she didn’t like the looks of those sharp teeth. Only once did her foot accidentally step on a toy, a thing plastic membrane that turned out to be one part of a pair of large wings and the creature shrieked and disappeared into the air and shadow. She shuddered, hurrying forward just a bit more carefully now. There was a sudden cheer and she looked to the corner to see that Buttons had finished the platform, close enough to the edge that she could use her nose to push the lid open. If he would just carry her back over, she could safely get out without waking any more of his so-called villains.
But even as she opened her mouth to tell him this, the great winged creature from earlier shrieked right beside her ear and knocked her into the pile of toys beside her. As she scrambled to the feet, the toys were still scattering and rising, testing limbs and gnashing sharp plastic teeth. She heard Buttons yell for her as she darted between toys, no longer being as careful not to brush anything. It seemed it was already too late to make this situation worse. Her tail snagged on something suddenly, and she glanced back to see it wedged firmly between the jaws of some prehistoric beast. Suddenly Buttons appeared out of nowhere, knocking the dinosaur aside so that Malis could complete her last dash to the pile of block. She climbed it in a rush of plastic adrenaline, leaping from surface to surface until the light yawned in the opening near her eye. Freedom! But a particularly gruesome roar dragged her shining eyes back to the melee below, her eyes finding Buttons wrestling several raptors amidst a floor now spotted with stuffing. There were several new tears in the fabric of his clothing. Horrified she turned to run back down the blocks to help her new friend, but he saw the notion swimming in her eyes and froze her with a shout. “Don’t you dare, little one! I’ve kept my promise.” He grunted, still managing to smile at her as he battled the dinosaurs. “It has been a pleasure, little-one. Thank you for one last grand adventure!” He managed to tear his arm free of a mouthful of long teeth, saluting Malis with one last smile as he disappeared beneath the chaos of enraged, shining plastic.
Unable to watch as stuffing settled like snow, she turned and pushed the edge of the lid with her nose, stunned as the chaos below fell silent with the thump thump thump of falling, inanimate plastic.
MALIS
makai x oksana
i'm sorry if there are errors or inconsistencies , i ran out of time with early fathers day stuff today! <3