KMD

“Oh, seven, eight, seven, eight …”

Would Ana probably fall in love with the Knight? 

“... four, five, nine …”

I mean — maybe? Maybe she would? 

“... three, three, oh.”

Well. 

Yes, he owed her this much. 

<ring ring … ring ring>

~

By the age of sixteen, Ana had been banned from every toyshop and Games Workshop in the region. Her photograph had been circulated by a disgruntled Toys R Us store manager following an especially troubling Boxing Day binge, and she had become — and still remains, in fact — persona non grata in the East Anglian toy merchandise world. 

Psychiatrists and psychologists eventually got involved, of course, determined to take their pound of flesh, and before long his little sister’s curious behaviour had been given a pretentious, scientific name: Kleptomaniacal Microphiliac Disorder. Or KMD.

“Could be worse,” was all their father had said on the matter, as he chewed through toast one morning. “Of all the ‘-philias’, I mean — could be worse.”

“True,” their mother had said, passively. “Could be worse.”

Trevor knew just how much this had affected Ana. Her photos all around town. The whispers behind her back at the bus-stop. The children shouting obscenities about Barbie and Ken. The cruel laughter. 

He’d never done enough to stand by his own sister. He’d treated her like an oddity, an unspeakable pervert, a freak; and as the various toys, trinkets and tchotchkes were being bagged up and removed from her room he’d breathed a painful sigh of relief — thinking, in error, that this whole sorry affair had been put to bed once and for all. 

In the following months, though, Ana retreated into herself and rarely came out of her room. She grew distant from Trevor and the rest of the family, and had taken to drawing tiny but elaborate scenes in chalk along the skirting boards of her bedroom, like a Lilliputian Bayeux Tapestry. Trevor could hear her at night, through the walls, narrating grandiloquent tales of tiny knights taking on dragons in order to save their burgeoning kingdoms. 

The doctors were all out of ideas. 

Eventually, Trevor headed off to college to study business, and slowly but surely forgot about his poor deluded sister, alone in her garrett. The after-work drinks had helped with this, he’d found — until now, that is. 

~

<ring ring … ring ring>

He checked himself. This was an absurd solution — in fact, it was no solution at all. 

Giving a sentient miniscule Knight with anger issues to a woman with a diagnosed paraphilic sexual attraction to tiny objects is unlikely to be a proposed course of treatment on The Mayo Clinic or from NHS Direct. What was he thinking?

But ... then, perhaps she’d fall in love with the Knight? And him with her? Perhaps this would be her happily ever after moment? This could be her redemption — as well as Trevor’s …?

<ring ring … ring ring>

Maybe.

“... Ana?” said Trevor. “I’ve got something for you.”

(February 2021)