Ball Jointed

When my grandmother was young, she often collected dolls. 

Now it's a habit that's coming to bite us in the ass. 

She had passed months ago but now was the time we finally cleaned her stuff out of her house. I would be set to live in it, being a broke college student still trying to find her breakout novel, so it was a sense of comfort for me. Most of her dolls were donated to collector's museums, others had to be thrown out due to parasites and the like. Except one. 

No matter how hard we got rid of him, he'd be back in his place of the attic. Burned and buried the ashes? Back the next morning like nothing happened. Sold off, he'd be back and the buyers were confused on how he left. Same with collectors. But the exorcist saw nothing wrong with him so I now have an otherworldly doll on my hands.  Yeah, I guess I should describe him.

The weirdest part to the entire family was how despite being ball jointed, he'd be able to stand up at most eye levels. To me, I'd be able to barely see out of his mess of blue violet hair, as the glue keeping slicked back had dried up over the years. His similarly colored eyes seemingly followed whoever was in the room, but it never felt out of malice. Rather, curiosity, as if he wanted to find out if you were a threat or not. His muted skin was kept very much clean over the years, even in my grandmother's failing health, but it looked stiff in that hybrid of prince and sailor clothes. Recently though, I've changed it out to an outfit of my design. A sleeveless hoodie, much to the colors of the original outfit's olive with a dark blue long sleeved shirt underneath with the original pants from the old outfit, because once the top's flair was removed, was a nice pair of teal tinted jeans that were always seemingly pressed. The shoes were more of a work in progress as I just gave it my old sneakers from middle school while I work on finding better looking ones, and I gave him my own personal touch. A pair of wire frame glasses that were made from paper clips spray painted black. I'm not sure how I decided on the idea of letting it try on my glasses, but I did, and ultimately decided to make him his own, since I obviously needed mine. 

And one cold and rainy September night, I tried to go through old documents to see how she got this doll, but I only found a scrap of information, and not even the one I needed.

His document referred to him as Samuel.

But to me, he's Sam. A probably haunted doll not aware of his owner's passing and her granddaughter's move into his home. 

I hope he likes me venting on where I should take my story next. He'll be getting a lot of that.