The Difference Between a Toy Girl and a Real Girl

So in the beginning there was a log that screamed, and the old man rescued it, made a puppet out of it. A very naughty puppet. He gave this ungrateful puppet his last three pears for food, sold his coat to get her to school, gave her literally all he had in the world. The puppet disobeys, runs off to the theater, somehow makes some money. But then instead, of giving the money to her destitute creator, like her chirping conscience tells her to, runs off again to the woods, to follow some fairy tales that mutilated animals tell her about(never trust foxes and cats that aren't actively trying to eat each other, Bar Rule #1), and then gets herself hanged by some thugs. This was the original ending. The Blue Fairy, and the donkeyness, and the growing ever growing nose, that's not how the story goes, but now of course it does. We're always changing things to add Blue Fairies. There is also, in another version, instead of lots of police and assault and unmarked graves, a city of Lost Children. Let's ignore this version, because we all know that's not fiction, that the City of Lost Children is very real and around us all the time, breathing poison into our lives through all the holes boredom has poked, like shiny little rips in the lamps, little glitters on the bedroom ceiling. Let's instead talk about that oh so naughty puppet, bad little moppet, Little Toy Girl that tries to be good oh so hard and make good friends and eat good things and run her little wooden feet so ragged on horrible torture creations that just make her go round and round in place, and then she goes dancing round and round some more, and wouldn't it be easier sometimes just to put her feet in the fire and leave them there, they're only wood after all. Sometimes she wakes up and she's just so wooden, so stiff and unfeeling and can't even bother to think about being selfish, beyond that primal right-at-the-center-of-her feeling to just hide and tell everything to fuck off, Blue Fairies included. Right? Fuck being a real girl? What do real girls get, anything so much better than this cave? Splinters, that's what real girls get, right in their eye.

But what do toy girls get? Oh dear Muppet Head, Bowling Ball Head, listen well. Toy girls get stuck out in the yard, forgotten by feverish boys, rotting little stuffed rabbits with missing eyes and patchy velour. Toy girls get scribbled on by bitchy little women, and toy girls get lost in the living room on road trips, buried in sandboxes where neighborhood cats pee on them and rain soaks their plastic heads. Toy girls get left behind. Real girls have the option of catching up, because they can walk on their own. And they can pull out splinters without crying like a broken baby doll with a string running out its back.