Gollies

Aunt Jennifer brought the two dolls down from the attic. She lay them next to a jam jar on the kitchen table and left for the store in search of wrapping paper.
In the absence of humans, Golly felt his stuffed body twitch to life.
“She’s going to give us to a kid,” Golly said as he stretched his stitched neck.
“Jennifer looks very old now,” Golly’s brother Golly replied, “perhaps being with a new kid will be fun.”
They saw their own reflections in the beveled jam jar—their frizzy hair, wide red lips, and soot black felt. Their faces looked oval and disfigured in the curves of the glass. Their black and white striped trousers, the matching bow ties, their ill-fitting red jackets, all looked just as they always had—the uniform of a village idiot, a dumb creature dressed as a clown.
“We can’t, Golly,” Golly sighed.
“Perhaps we can go back to the attic?” Golly asked hopefully.
“We are Golliwog dolls, Golly,” Golly replied, “and I have come to believe that keeping us and hiding us just makes everything worse too.”
Golly’s wide eyes met Golly’s wide eyes, and their stares were fixed because that was how their stares were stitched.
“I wish, just for a moment,” Golly lamented, “that I could stop smiling. I think if I could stop smiling then this might have all been a little more bearable.”
Golly unscrewed the lid from the jam jar. The sweet, sugary, strawberry goop filled the jar all the way to the brim. They had come from jam, well, at least from the jam company in return for cut-out coupons, and even though it felt right to Golly, and Golly did not disagree, returning to the jam from whence they came left a bitter taste in his sewn-shut mouth.
“I suppose there is at least something a little poetic to all of this, isn’t there Golly?”
Golly lay the gold-colored jam lid down on the counter.
“Probably not, Golly. There simply aren’t romantic poems about racists and jam.”
Golly shuffled himself onto the edge of the jar. He pushed his right leg into the viscous preserve. It took a few moments of intense pressure before his leg fully punctured the surface and started to slide easily into the strawberry abyss below.
Further and further Golly slid himself in—an ankle, a leg, an arm, a shoulder—until only his head was left unsubmerged.
“What if they historicize us?” Golly reasoned as he tried to keep his chin above the jam line. “Maybe we could be artifacts, we could be cultural rather than appalling.”
“No, Golly,” Golly answered as he pushed the lid down over Golly’s head and onto the jar.
“What about ironic? We could be ironic, couldn’t we?”
“No, Golly,” Golly answered again as he screwed the lid on tightly, “I’m sorry my friend.”
He told himself he wouldn’t look, but as he walked over to the sink he couldn’t help but look. There was Golly, wide grin pushed firm against the glass, every inch of him expanding as jam soaked through into his stuffing. Golly knew Golly couldn’t cry, but he swore in that moment, as a strawberry seed slowly stroked its way across Golly’s jam filled face, that Golly had shed a tear.
Golly shuffled quickly to the garbage disposal switch. The whir of the blades roared into action, awoken, shaken from their docile state. He took one last look across the kitchen – the chair where he had lunched with little Jennifer and her collection of ponies, the cookie jar he had been concealed in for Jennifer’s games of hide-n-seek, the slick linoleum floor Jennifer had slid him across.
“We should have done this a long time ago.”
He leapt.
In the movie version an orchestra’s string section plays a minor chord melody as Golly swan dives in slow motion. The music thins out, just one violin now as Golly is paused in mid-air with the camera circling him. Then the violin bow drags over one last note, and as the sound of that dulcet string disappears real time erupts—Golly tucks his arms in, makes himself narrow, and plunges into the dark, rancid garbage disposal with its spinning blades and snarling guts.
In Aunt Jennifer’s kitchen the garbage disposal’s motor struggles, slowed as if stuck. It has managed to open a shoulder and split through a calf, but Golly’s body is jamming the mechanism.
The front door slams shut as Aunt Jenifer thunders in and out to grab her forgotten purse.
The slamming reverberates across the house, across the kitchen, and the disposal lurches into a full spin, spitting Golly’s innards high into the air. The fluff floats slowly down, gently caressing the floor as it lands, waiting to be swept away.