Voodoo Baby

Irma set her sister’s dolls on fire with matches she stole from Grandma Rose’s smoking table and what gas was left in the garage. The naked babies caught with a whomp and a pop. Plastic faces sizzled and melted in a blackened ooze. Glass eyeballs floated, then fell into collapsing skulls. Grandma Rose’s vegetable garden smelled like hot plastic and burned hair. Who’s hair?
The biggest doll, a fat pink cloth baby, was last to fully burn. Irma wished she had more gas, but the metal can was empty, and she wasn’t old enough to walk up to the gas station alone. If she took her little sister Evie, Irma could go then, buy bubble gum and two packs of Grandma Rose’s cigarettes. Probably not gas.
Yesterday, the girls had been poking in ashtrays for candy money. Grandma Rose sometimes buried change in the ash, forgetting. Evie found a dime and told Irma when Irma died, people would put spare change on her eyes. Dirty pennies, spit cleaned. And they would all cover their own eyes with rose petals to hide her ugly. Even Mommy, Evie said, covered her eyes in green satin, in the end. Ugly sister.
Mommy had given all she had left to Evie. Nothing to Irma. So, Irma took the dolls, piled them up between hills of young pumpkins just vining and setting green fruit, stuck ashy dimes to those dolls’ blue glass eyes, doused them with gas and struck a wooden match. Grandma Rose only used wooden matches. Cleaner burn, she said.
Now the dolls smoldered, black smoke puffs from their feet and bellies. Irma poked the fat cloth baby with a garden claw until cloth cracked and thick red hair, braided and rolled and tied with a green satin ribbon, fell out of the doll’s body, and ignited. The baby burned from the inside out.
Red hair snapped as it was consumed. All that was left of their mother turned to ash.

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Cheryl Meyer is a writer, artist and teacher living in the  middle of Michigan woods, where she draws inspiration from dark trails. Her most recent flash fiction was published in Up North Lit.