Here’s our second installment of #summershortreads: short stories, poems, essays, etc. for your long summer days. This is “Jackie Paper” by Cassondra Windwalker.

 

Shaky fingers tapped out the dried herb, rolled the paper. For a moment, smoke filled the computer screen through which Dr. Garcia dispassionately regarded his patient. Garcia had been a medic in Afghanistan and a vice cop on the streets of Anchorage, which was the only reason the average cop was willing to even consider talking to him now that he was the closest thing they had to peer support. These days all counseling sessions took place screen to screen – not ideal, but what could you do? Even before the pandemic, geographical limitations and a shortage of professionals had dictated virtual meets. And Garcia was disinclined to judge his patients for the perfectly legal self-medication they attempted. Of course, law enforcement wasn’t supposed to indulge in the freedom offered by the marijuana laws, but as long as they were functional, who was checking? And if they were functional, they weren’t talking to him. Nobody came to the shrink until they absolutely had to. So Garcia simply waited for Dixon Reed to take another hit and answer his question.

“I don’t want to talk about Jackie Paper.”

Garcia shrugged. Sometimes you had to allow a lie to move past it. “What do you want to talk about, Dix?”

Dixon Reed stared blearily off-screen. He scrubbed a hand over his face, already carved with at least ten years’ worth of lines that weren’t his. “All I can think about is that damned window. I dream about it.”

Garcia had seen all the files. He knew the window. The cheapest glass a person could buy, the screen to keep the mosquitoes out long since rotted away. Not that it mattered – that window hadn’t been opened in years. Reed had snapped a photo when he approached the front door. Every inch of glass was covered with garish cut-outs of paper boys with crayoned faces sad and angry or just blank. They sported every type of skin – brown paper sacks, cardboard, receipt paper, but the grim horror of their unrelenting despair was all the same.

“Why the window?”

Reed laughed harshly. “You’re the doctor. Aren’t you supposed to tell me?”

Garcia leaned forward on his desk, rested his chin on his clasped hands. Said nothing.

Reed inhaled again, exhaled slowly without coughing. “That window was everything, man. It was everything.”

“You grew up with Jack Pearson, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Sort of. I mean, he didn’t last long in school. Too weird. Too scared. Too – ” Reed’s mouth twisted painfully. “Too pitiful, I guess. His mom pulled him out, supposedly to homeschool him. But hardly anybody ever saw him after that.”

“Do you think his home was abusive?”

“Naw. At least, not on purpose. Old Mrs. Pearson was her own kind of weird, but she was devoted to her kid. I’m sure she did her best, but that can’t have been much. It’s not like she kept him inside – he didn’t want to go out.”

“So from the time he was a child to here recently, he never left the house?”

Reed shook his head. “We’d see him now and then on the beach with his mom, collecting coal for their stove. But that was it.”

“So the paper dolls kept the world out, you think?”

The screen filled briefly with an up-close shot of Reed’s sweatpants-clad midriff as he stood abruptly and began pacing the room.

“Maybe. I don’t know. You’d think they’d face inside, wouldn’t you, if he didn’t want to look outside. But all those faces were looking out. Like they were trapped there, against the glass.” Reed made a disgusted sound. “You know why he made those things.”

Yeah. Garcia knew. Reed might not look like much of a specimen at the moment, but he’d been a conscientious, dedicated cop. No doubt the reason he was so deeply fucked up now. His reports were invariably detailed and in-depth. Beautifully precise specimens of the devout ass-covering every department required these days.

Apparently, in the brief days Jack Pearson had attended public school, he’d had a friend. Or maybe he’d only imagined her, who knew? Reed hadn’t remembered the little girl, but if she’d been on the fringes like Pearson, he likely wouldn’t have noticed her as a kid himself. Whatever the truth was, Jack Pearson claimed that little girl had read him the story of Puff the Magic Dragon. Suggested that for every bad day he had, he could cut out a little Jackie Paper who’d take all that sadness and misery on itself and leave him free.

Garcia had seen the photos taken of the interior of the Pearson cabin, too. Every wall was covered with those hideous little paper boys, strung with coal-dusted cobwebs in the dimness of the oil-lit rooms. Pearson’s mom had survived on the very edges of society herself, their slope-shouldered off-grid hovel a testament to her own undiagnosed mental illness. Garcia’s heart constricted in spite of himself at the thought of those two shattered souls, trying to hold together with nothing but love a life the world was determined to pull apart.

“He was sad. Lonely.”

Reed snorted. “Yeah. That’s putting it mildly.”

“So why were you there that day?” Garcia knew the answer already, but this was how the game was played.

Reed’s face reappeared in the screen as he slumped back into his chair. “I should’ve been there a week before. Should’ve called somebody. I knew what happened to his mom. I just honestly didn’t think about it. I was busy. It hardly registered.”

Jack Pearson’s mother had been carried out of her house to die alone on a ventilator in a hospital miles away. Who knew where she’d encountered the virus – the grocery store, the food bank, the post office. No running water at her home and her general state of poverty coupled with her own instability had left her particularly vulnerable. Her adult son had been left behind in the rotting cabin he hadn’t left for years. Someone – not Reed – had had to drive to his home to notify him when she died, since they had no electricity and no phone. Garcia wondered what that had been like, how many dolls Jackie Paper had cut out that night and pasted up on the walls already so deeply shingled with sorrows.

“Wasn’t there a social worker assigned to Jack Pearson already, somebody who should have checked up on his care after his mother’s death?”

Reed laughed bitterly. “Mrs. Pearson wouldn’t have tolerated anything like that. Although I doubt she even knew it was a possibility. Maybe one of Jack’s teachers would have said something, back when he was in elementary school, but I don’t imagine Mrs. Pearson would have reacted well to the suggestion there was anything wrong with Jack. As far as she was concerned, the world was broken, not her boy. Nobody was watching. Nobody was looking out. I could’ve been, if it had occurred to me, but God help me. It never did.”

Garcia stifled a start when Reed slapped the desk in front of his screen. “That’s not even true. Some people were watching. Some people were looking out. Until we made sure they wouldn’t.”

“Agata Romanov.” Garcia tried and failed to keep the heaviness from his name as he said the six-year-old’s name aloud.

Reed’s head sunk into his palms. “Agata Romanov.”

The insularity of off-grid homesteaders and the Russian Old Believer communities were complementary in many respects. The onset of the virus had made little inroads on the daily lives of either. So when little Agata’s kitten had gone missing, she’d slipped away from home without a care and tromped dutifully cabin to cabin, hunting her lost kitty.

Several neighbors told troopers the child had been at their doors, asking after her cat. The trail had led directly to Jack Pearson’s creepy, crumbling cabin, with its macabre orchestra of paper performers singing an endless dirge.

Dixon Reed had volunteered to knock on that door. He knew ol’ Jackie Paper, he told the other guys. Went to school with him, back in the day. He’d be able to coax the crazy guy out.

And he had. Jack had even let him in. Reed had taken note of the foil casserole dishes left by solicitous neighbors, had remembered just in time to offer some sympathies for the death of Mrs. Pearson. Even in that moment, it hadn’t occurred to him to wonder what would become of this skeletonized recluse with his hollow eyes and anxious mouth once the funeral dishes were empty. He’d been entirely focused on a missing little girl, ready to see bogey men behind every green tree.

So when he’d found the aluminum foil cutout of a little girl with a knife-cut frown on her blank face lying on a cluttered table, his blood had run cold.

“Who’s this?” he’d demanded. “Where is Agata? Where is Agata now?”

Garcia couldn’t fault the guy. It was easy to see monsters in every distorted face when they walked so casually even in suits and ties on the streets. A missing child. A crazy recluse. A smoking paper doll. It had been too easy to put the dots together.

Easy for embittered cops and suspicious neighbors. Not so easy for district attorneys. No actual proof of anything more than Agata’s presence in Jack Pearson’s home emerged, but that was enough. His cabin, that lone little girl doll, was the last vestige of Agata that could be found. From his doorstep, her path vanished.

They’d intended to bring the dogs out, but this was Alaska. It rained, and it rained, and it rained. There’d been no point. Everyone had been certain of the truth, though. Jackie Paper was the monster in their midst. No-one brought casseroles to his door. They spat when they passed by.

“Tell me what hurts more,” Garcia said softly. “Agata Romanov or Jackie Paper.”

Reed didn’t raise his head, but Garcia heard that awful convulsive sob of a man who isn’t, ever, allowed to cry.

They’d found little Agata, and her lost kitten, six weeks later. Even without dogs, the smell had led the neighbors to the truth. An abandoned well, its cover long rotted and obscured by leaves, held what remained. Perhaps Agata had seen her kitten trapped down below and tried to rescue her. Perhaps Agata had fallen first and the recalcitrant kitten had leapt down to join her. At any rate, they hadn’t heard the child’s cries because she’d made none. A crushed skull, softened by spring rains, bore testament to the trauma of her initial fall. Perhaps, they hoped, she’d never suffered.

But Jackie Paper surely had.

After Reed recounted the evidence he’d found of Agata’s last stop before her disappearance, the kindness of the community had evaporated as suddenly as the fog over the bay when the summer sun rose unrelenting. No more foil dishes. No more baskets of garden vegetables and fresh eggs. No more cakes and muffins and loaves of bread.

Garcia strained to hear Reed’s muffled reply.

“Is there a difference?” the man moaned.

Garcia supposed not. Two broken, abandoned, rotted children, discovered long after kindness could have made a difference.

He thought what Jackie Paper’s final human interaction before the cops came and tore it apart had been. A small child, a young girl like the only friend he’d either had or imagined, had appeared like magic on his doorstep. Seeking aid like some character in a fairytale. Jackie Paper had offered her the only incantation he knew: he’d invited her to make a paper doll of her own, to transfer all her poor childish griefs to the aluminum foil that held the sympathies offered on his mother’s body, and so extinguish all her sadness. Jack had to know it didn’t work. After all, he’d tried it every single day of his own life, and still awoke every morning to more sadness and solitude. But he kept trying. Kept looking out that window with crayon eyes, hoping for a different day. And he’d offered that different day to little Agata.

Who, with her own willingness to believe, had tried. Had tried, and then died, alone, in a hole in a wet wood. And a few days or weeks later, her last friend, Jackie Paper, had shrunk up and withered away too.

When Reed came knocking on Pearson’s door after they recovered Agata’s body, the door swung open beneath his fist. The husk of Jackie Paper was propped convulsed in a hideous posture in his mother’s rocking chair, his lap littered with open-mouthed, staring-eyed paper dolls.

Garcia forced out some platitudes even he didn’t hear. Some realities held no truths that men were strong enough to bear. He was a suturer of the dead, a surgeon to the ghastly. No-one liked to admit that some people were too hurt to be healed. Him least of all. So he said everything he could think of, offered every half-truth and consolation, every blessing and namaste he could muster. Reed nodded as if he heard, the unspoken agreement between doctor and patient that all lies must be honored in the end.

“Same time next week?” Garcia asked finally.

Reed looked him in the eyes then, for the first time in the entire session. “Sure, doc.”

He smiled. Garcia tried not to shudder, clicked on the leave meeting icon.

Dixon Reed rifled through his desk drawer. Pushed aside the pistol for now. Reached for the scissors and a sheet of printer paper. Fingers trembling, he cut out a jagged figure of a man. He seized a pen and then froze, unmoving, unthinking, absent of every impulse. The paper doll stared back at him, blank-faced and silent.

Cassondra Windwalker earned a BA of Letters from the University of Oklahoma. Born and raised on the red clay, she’s wandered the sticky corn fields of the Midwest, the frozen seas of the Wild North, and frequently rests her wings where orange skies meet purple mountains. She’s the author of novels and poetry and does her best to keep fed a menagerie of stray critters, cryptids, marooned kelpies, and lost specters. Her novel, The Gardener’s Wife’s Mistress, will be published by Type Eighteen Books in January, 2026. It’s available for preorder HERE.