That Will Just Enrage the Doll

Story Sent in by Cate:

I have a small collection of Russian matryoshka dolls, the wooden kind that nest one little figure inside another, inside another, and so on. I mention this to the dating world, on my profile, as a minor hobby.

Enter Steve, a freelance photographer I met on Plentyoffish. On our first date, I was surprised when he passed a small, wrapped box to me, at the dinner table.

He prefaced it with, "I know you collect them."

I opened the gift, and it was not, as I had assumed, a matryoshka doll: it was a little plastic baby doll, but like one I had never seen before. It's eyes pointed in different directions, it had random patches of long brown hair streaming out from its head, its mouth was wide open, and it had a single, protruding horn coming out of the right side of its head. In short, the most horrifying doll I've ever seen.

He seemed earnest and sincere, so I said, "Thank you. Where did you get this?"

He said, "That would be revealing my secret. Enjoy it. There's plenty more where that came from."

That was hardly reassuring. It looked nothing at all like a matryoshka doll, so I honestly can't guess at what he was thinking.

After the date was when it became really creepy, though. I brought the doll home, but resolved to drop it off at a Salvation Army donation center as soon as possible. An email from Steve arrived the next day, asking me why my Plentyoffish profile was still up: "We're dating, so maybe you should take it down."

One date with a guy didn't mean that I had to take my profile down. I wrote back a nicer version of that, and he replied, "I almost had to take a human life to get you that doll. What gives?"

I dropped the doll off at its new thrift store home, that day, and I never spoke to Steve again.