Sometimes a little doll would cry. She’s got a stitching pain, she has. Oh, what the menagerie peonies would say if they could but glimpse her sorrow. The pain will grow and rip her open, the sawdust will spill out. And the seamstress will laugh at the dolly’s misfortune, for the doll-maker was much too cheap to fix a doll that not one child wanted.

‘Oh,’ the dolly sighed, ‘it is more than likely I shall break for good. I should bother the doll-maker in spite, and perhaps sing a song of my unfortunate life in this shop’. So despite the doll-makers warnings he gave her when she had been made that she should not talk to nor move about the customers, the dolly sang a song of her life as a doll, of her loneliness, and her grief.

Her voice carried over the shelves, past the glass of the shop, out into the street, and spilled over the lofts and apartments. A poet with still hands heard her song, the sadness of her woes, and inspired, his hand swept over his paper and recounted the dolly’s song. The poem was so popular amongst its readers that it sold thousands, and those thousands loved the poem so much, that they sang the song to their children, who sang it to their children, and so on.

However, the tune they sang was merrier than that of the doll’s eulogy in reflection of the poets ecstatic inspiration, and therefore was interpreted as a happy tale rather than a sad one. So even when all that was left of the dolly was a pile of sawdust and stitches, the seamstress still laughed. For the dolly, understood by no one in life, would continue to be misunderstood, by everyone, in death.