Her friend was weird, this, was the thoughts of a child named Emily, only six years of age, seated together with her friend, beneath a oak tree in the vilge square, seated just beside a overgrown stone statue depicting a face of a divine that she couldn’t really pronounce the name of.

  Anne, who seems to be deeply immersed in puzzling out the wooden doll that Emily’s father gave her as a off-handed toy to py with whilst he and Anne’s mother assumedly left them to their own devices.

  “Why are you so interested in that toy Anne?”

  Emily questions confusedly, there really wasn’t anything special about it, just a doll made of wood her father made on a evening one day out of boredom, it was carved from oak, chiseled with a well-cared for instrument, and squeezed apart with careful harsh fingers.

  “It’s made of wood”

  Emily squints her eyes confusedly.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s filled with gears”

  “…Ye-s?”

  “This fascinates me”

  Blunt, was the word of her friend, Anne, her pale fingers curling around the wooden doll itself, her nails scratches against the stray pieces of bark that was starting to strip off from it, Emily couldn’t quite put her mind on what exactly about all of this that just felt so odd, why did Anne care so much about the wooden doll in specific again? Was it because she never saw one?

  Curiosity elucidated, Emily spoke.

  “Because it’s a doll?”

  “No”

  Again, Emily was confused, ‘No’ to what exactly? Her answer? That she wasn’t correct about the fact it was a wooden doll or something else entirely, Emily contemptes, furrowing her brows together as she juggles the problem inside her skull and spoke to her friend again a third time in a vain attempt to decipher the inner workings of Anne who seems to expect her to be capable of understanding exactly what she meant through one-word and vaguely worded replies.

  “Because it’s made from…wood?”

  “Part of it”

  She feels mildly ruffled, confuffled, if such a word was a thing, confusedly ruffled, her back wings scrunch up together near her spine as she leans forward, her small hands gripping the stone tiles beneath her as she thinks and speaks her third guess at what exactly her friend meant.

  “Do you just like the gears, Anne?”

  She asks innocuously enough.

  “I do, A lot”

  Anne’s replies were snipped, as if someone combed through a bush and decided to shear away the necessary branches that’d have let someone knew that it was, in fact, a bush, and not a particurly ugly twig filled with berries and sagging hanging fruits, it was a off-reply but Emily was very used to it, she’s been Anne’s friend since they were in the cradles together after all, though she doesn’t quite get what her friend’s mother meant when she screamed at her that day two years ago at her house.

  She doesn’t get a lot of things, this was fine, she wasn’t in a particur hurry to get things.

  “Why do you like them a lot?”

  She says in a reminder, kicking forward the inquiry with all the grace of a obese horse and hitting it squarely in Anne’s abdomen judging by the fact her friend curls into a Vee-shaped on the stone as if the question physically hurts her.

  Emily squawks out something resembling a ugh.

  “You’re funny sometimes Anne”

  She squawks out between a hissed giggle and something resembling a very amused snort of air, A expulsion that makes her face wrinkles somewhere between ‘normal’ and ‘absolutely trying to not crack her rgest grin’.

  “I— am not, This wooden doll is just fascinating”

  Her friend pauses, seemingly thinking, dredging up something inside her skull, Emily tilts her head to the side and let her ear tendrils fps against the side of her skull, in the same manner her mother’s did, feeling the newly blooming feathers softly pressing against her temples.

  “Of course”

  She entertains that notion, her friend really was funny.

  “I mean it”

  She was getting flustered now, Anne was getting flustered, The spikes out the side of her skull was straightening up in that tell-tale manner that wiggles and stiffens at odd intervals as her cheeks began blushing uncontrolbly.

  Emily giggles, letting her friend rile herself up.

  “This wooden doll—“ Anne began to flusteredly justify, finally riled out of her emotionless shell “—is very fascinating, Okay? It’s—“

  “How exactly is it fascinating?”

  It’s just a wooden doll went unsaid but the sentiment was clear to anyone with half-a-brain between them, and Anne knew that, given the fact her cheeks flushed red and the horns struck sky-high straight as a stiff branch.

  “The gears are interconnected” The word, was delivered like a spilled bucket, “All I had to do was spin the key on it’s back and it’ll walk on it’s own—“ and much like a spilled bucket, the word vomit was starting to ramble off in a hazy dreary tune towards nowhere, Her word vomit eventually cascaded into a word flood.

  “—and, and the gears. Are all this and that and that’s just really fascinating to me Amelia! The gears! You know what I mean by gears right? Of course you do, all the gears and wood and— all the fact it can move on it’s own after just a little of twisting makes me want to—“

  Who was Amelia?

  Abruptly, Anne caught herself.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “This wooden doll is very fascinating”

  A btant attempt at misdirecting the topic away,

  Emily will accept it, for now.