I am a Doll

I am a Doll

Short story

I am a doll. I am a very classic looking doll.

I have a plastic body with movable arms and yellow hair made of yarn. As for where I came from and how I got here, that’s a story that might take a while. Take a seat on that chair, it came from Australia and is only made from some of the most expensive wood in existence. Get comfortable, I’m going to start from the very beginning.

My plastic was made from oil extracted in Canada. That oil was transferred through pipes to America, where it was refined into its different components. I am made from naphtha, because it is a soft and cheap plastic. That naphtha was shipped to chinese factories, where they melted pellets and molded them into my moving arms, legs, body, and my head. Every type of part was brought to an assembly plant by different trucks.

There my arms and legs were attached to my body. My head had little colored beads inserted for eyes before it too was attached to my body.

Those beads came from plant in Sweden that molds thousands of plastic eyes per day.

My fully assembled but still relatively blank body was filled into the back of a truck with hundreds of other doll bodies just like mine and moved to one final factory. The truck was unloaded and automated robots put the bodies one by one on a conveyer belt. This conveyer belt had clamps to hold us while needles inserted yarn for our hair. This yarn came from Germany, and the wool used in the making of the yarn came from Australia. Later, on the same assembly line, our default outfits were placed on us. Every one of us, thousands in all, got a very plain striped shirt and fake jeans.

Then we were wrapped in a plastic container shaped just like us, heat sealed in, and stamped with a colorful label. Me, with hundreds of other dolls just like me, was loaded once more onto a truck that took us to a dock. That dock had a ship waiting to take all of the dolls back to America.

Once in an American port, we were loaded for the last time into a truck that took a small number of us to a nearby supermarket. I was placed in storage for restocking once enough of my sister dolls had been sold.

I have now been left here, because the supermarket that I was in has been sold to a company operating out of India. They have plans to bulldoze the building in order to make a new computer manufacturing plant. I have been left here with everything else in storage, because the Indian company didn’t think that they could make any money by removing all of the stuff. I know that my fragile plastic body will not survive being crushed by the concrete building, so I’m trying to tell my story before the demolition crew arrive.

By Wyatt Wolford