*Shortlisted for Gooseberry Pie’s 2nd Annual Writing Contest
Photo by Freepix.com
by Barbara Westwood Diehl
My daughter has positioned all the Polly Pocket figures in a corner of her room, where sunlight from her window spotlights some Pollies and hides others in shadows, in imagined videos, in the sets of her own little TikTok world. When she tires of the videoclip in her head, she snaps those Pollies into their pink plastic playsets and places another tableau in spotlight—the Polly Pocket Travel Playset or Polly Pocket Birthday Party Playset—the bedroom curtain falling on each scene, the tik tok tik tok of time in shadows and light. The Pollies are positioned into the trending and the canceled, into the hashtagged and the dead. When they hang out in their Poppin’ Party Pad, riding in the elevator from the smoothie bar to the spa, she tells me, This is the world when everyone is still alive. I want to remain in this world of everyone alive, but I know each clip dies after TikTok minutes. When the Pollies and I will be casketed, snapped shut, into our sets.
Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, and Pithead Chapel.
