The image left an indelible mark in my brain. Countless times, I’ve thought about or showed others the pic of the outstretched plastic hand grasping toward salvation. People usually react the same way I did, emitting a peal of sharp, unsettled laughter, like they appreciate the joke but they’re also a little perturbed to have seen it.
The dolls kept coming.
Not six months later and 10 blocks away from where my husband encountered Garbage Bag Baby, we jointly happened upon a balding, bedraggled figurine, her eyes softly pleading for rescue.
Several years after that, during the first few months of the pandemic, a bunch of bored neighbors amused themselves by staging a pair of Victorian playthings at people’s front doors, ours included.
Once I started noticing them, dolls (or sometimes just parts of them) were seemingly everywhere.
So a couple of years ago, when I was doing some late-summer decluttering of my daughter’s bedroom and had to figure out what to do with the dolls she’d outgrown, the answer came to me like a disembodied whisper: “October’s almost here. Place them out on the lawn.”
