She came wielding the plastic doll that smelled of off gasses.

“No,” Matt said to his daughter from the comfort of his couch. “Go to the table.”

“Want you see this,” she tried. She had tried before.

Matt said, “Okay, I’ll see. Go to the table.” He grabbed hold of the little plastic doll, its figure deformed by decades of institutional frat boy body-shaming. When his daughter turned, he hurled her doll like a tiny blond-haired throwing axe over his shoulder. Blindly.

He wasn’t throwing it behind his couch deeper into the kitchen. Rather up. His living room occupied an open space in the house and a great loft haloed the space with a ledge. If one wanted to during their Super Bowl party, one could stand on the railing of the playroom upstairs in the loft and look down into the living room straight at the grotesquely large television set cramped in the deepest part of their sanctuary where the altar ought go. From the vantage of the couch in the living room, a clean arc from a doll would clear that wall and land in the center of the play room.

He wanted the girls to have a place where they could make an absolute disaster of things and he didn’t have to know or see. It’s not like the house didn’t have baggage. Or messes. He just liked to stuff chaos, inner and outer alike. It wasn’t really a mess if you hid it, right? Junk in the garage, storage closet, the pantry. He and his wife would pick up the teacups of guests before they even got a third of the way through them and stuff those too. Hospitality: too gross. So out in the main floor, everything looked squeaky clean. It looked that way. 

It was not.

But the bulimic supermodel doll flew up and into the girl’s playroom before his second child could turn and realize what had happened.

She, unfortunately, had five more dolls in her hands.

“Can I see those?”

She turned to get more.

All five of them he yoinked over his shoulder into the abyss of the playroom loft. 

She didn’t have any more at present: bored with it, she entered the kitchen.

The addict’s hoard of dolls didn’t stop her grandparents from bringing an entire collection in a thin plastic box. She tore into those bodies, shedding micro plastics into thin air, and Matt played, for a moment, with her. Then he threw them while she was distracted, one at a time over his shoulder. Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen. Until only the one remained and he let her take it to the table. 

#

“Nah,” he said to his friends at the coffeeshop while they drank. “My kids have too many toys but they play with them all.”

“All of them?” Bobby asked.

“Sure!” 

“Doesn’t that… you know… make it hard to focus on any one of them?”

“Nah,” Matt said. 

That night he catapulted another forty stuffed bears over his head into the play room. They had been brought by his brother-in-law. Plastic fibers, you know the kind.

Over the next few weeks, his daughter had brought him ten ridable plastic John Deere tractors, five dragons larger than him, an entire wardrobe of princess dresses, stacks and stacks of pointless games of chance,  dolls and dolls and dolls and remote controlled cars, plastic cash registers, plastic cookery, plastic typewriters, plastic mechanic shops, plastic plastic factories. Each one in turn, he threw over his head.

“Daddy? Did you see?”

“Nope, dinner time,” he said and pitched it.

One voice tuned to the right pitch in the alpine is all it takes to cause the snow to cascade down the cliffs, they say. That’s true in suburbia as well. When the blonde hatchet hit above, it matched the resonant frequency of Montagne de Plastique. Awesome and awful unite in awe: for the weight of the second story junkyard breached the damn of the loft. Its pitch created a giant plastic avalanche that stormed over through the loft’s wall into midair towards the father’s eyes, eyes finally wide with wonder. 

* * *