Sable hears thunder and sees palm fronds whipping against the window. She picks up her phone. The weather app reads, “No need to pull the hurricane shutters. This will be a quick one. But expect it every day and expect excessive heat.” Sable whispers, “A heat dome.” It’s like being trapped in a hot pot of water with the lid on. Her father says, “Like for a crab boil, except our fate ain’t as quick.”
The storm goes on longer than expected. On the local news station’s website, the headline reads, “Eighth tourist of 2026 found dead. The cause of death for all was heat exhaustion, but they all also recently visited Alex the doll at the Fort Keys History Museum.” Sable raises one eyebrow.
Sable’s due to meet her friend Rossi. She rushes outside, snaps on her helmet, and hops on her bike. Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She pulls off the path to look at it. It’s Rossi’s mom. “Emergency! Rossi has signs of serious heat exhaustion. We’re at the hospital.” The tourists with heat exhaustion make sense. But Rossi?
At the hospital, the automatic doors slide open. Steam rises off Sable. She finds Rossi’s room. Rossi’s got an IV drip and looks so weak. “What happened, Rossi?” Rossi says, “I’m not really sure. I went with Erick to the museum where they keep that creepy doll. The one they say is haunted. We had been riding bikes, but still.”
Sable rolls her eyes and plops on the edge of the bed. “Ok, but you’re not a tourist. How did you get heat exhaustion?” Rossi says, “It’s not just tourists who get sick in this heat.” Sable says, “Sure. We all have a fate like the crab.” Rossi looks at her in confusion. Sable jumps up. “Never mind, something my dad says about the heat domes.”
Sable types “Alex the Doll” into a search engine. She learns that a German family brought the doll to Key West, that the doll might be one of the most haunted objects in the world, and, most curiously to Sable, the doll’s stuffed with wood wool, likely spruce from the Black Forest.
The next morning, she wakes to several missed calls from Rossi’s mom. She jolts out of bed and splashes cold water on her face. She calls Rossi’s mother. “Hi, Sable,” she says quietly. Sable feels the melancholy in the empty space. Dread hits her in the gut. “Hi. Uh, I noticed I missed your calls. Everything ok?” Sable hears sniffles and knows everything is not ok. Rossi’s mom says, “No. She’s…gone. I’m devastated.”
Sable grieves in the way a tropical storm may ravage through town. She slams doors and groans. She kicks her bicycle over, then picks it up and rides toward the museum.
Sable bangs on the museum’s doors and windows. “There’s not even a sign on the door with the hours!” She sits down on the ground, the back of her head tapping the door. Wails heave out of her body. Sable hears something, a spectral voice from inside the building, the auditory equivalent of seeing a rainbow after light passes through a prism. She hears on repeat, “I watch. Take care.”
Startled, Sable stands up and away from the door. She rides her bike along the shore to the park. She walks along the path to a stand of Gumbo Limbo trees, finds her favorite one, and crawls into a crook of its branches.
Just as she closes her eyes, she feels a concentrated spot of warmth. Instead of opening her eyes, she squeezes them shut tight. She hears a spectral voice again, this one more lilting. “The wood wants to go home,” it says. Sable sits up and huffs, “This is ridiculous!”
Something compels her to stay. “Fine,” she huffs, leaning back against the branch. She hears, “The doll, filled with wood. Filled with magic. Watcher wants to go home.” Sable stares at the branches. “I can’t believe I’m listening to a tree,” she thinks.
Sable rides home. She wonders if her grief has swallowed her and spit back out someone who hears voices in plants. Memories unspool. Times over her life, even as a little girl, when she thought she heard bogus voices. Maybe they were real?
Sable sits down on a lounge chair on the patio. On her phone, she searches, “Black Forest Germany legends Alex the Doll.” She clicks on a short video about legends of the Black Forest. The Watcher acts as a guardian of the forest, rather than a creature of ill intent. “It doesn’t seem to match the doll’s acts of aggression,” she thinks.
She reclines the lounge chair and closes her eyes. She opens them to thunder. The wind picks up. She looks at the swaying palm trees and the jacaranda petals blowing off their bushes and swirling in the sky. Large drops of warm rain fall, plopping on her face, the palm leaves, and the patio stones.
Sable imagines the towering evergreen trees, lush moss carpets, and delicate wildflowers of the Black Forest. She looks around at the glossy, bright tropical plants of South Florida. A spirit from the Black Forest would find these plants so exotic, so foreign. She feels a prickle between her eyebrows and on the back of her neck. “That doll is out of its literal elements,” she thinks. “Protective powers gone haywire, maybe, in this environment?”
Her night of sleep is fitful. “Even if the museum is open, the staff won’t let me get that close to the doll,” she thinks. In the dark hours of the morning, she gets out of bed. Despite the persistent heat, she puts on her heaviest long sleeves and pants. She stuffs the first heavy thing she can find, a textbook, into her bag. She adds a flattened cardboard box, packing tape, and a black permanent marker. She heaves herself on her bicycle and rides to the museum.
She rides around the building to make sure there are no cameras. She pulls the textbook out of her bag and slams it as hard as she can into the door’s glass. It cracks but doesn’t cave in. Sable picks it up again, pulls her sleeves over her hands, and whacks harder, over and over with the corner of the book. Finally, it gives way. She smashes away as many pieces as possible. She carefully climbs through the door, shrouded in broken glass.
Sable scans the room for the doll and finds it in a glass case. She runs back, grabs her textbook, and a pointed metal object from the junkyard art. The case is dark except for a small safety light on the ceiling. Sable expects to feel creeped out, but she doesn’t. She smashes the case’s corner with the pointed end of the metal. It makes a big crack. Then she picks up her textbook and smashes the glass until she can reach the doll.
Dawn brings increasing light. She needs to work fast. As she reaches in, her sleeve gets caught on a shard of glass. She grabs the doll’s foot and yanks it out. The exposed part of her arm pulls along the shard of glass, slicing it open. Sable screams. The gash in her arm gets blood everywhere. She stuffs the doll in her backpack, dripping blood on its sailor suit.
Sable runs out of the museum. Her arm, still bleeding, throbs with pain. She worries about both the persistent bleeding and the potential for getting caught. She rips the bottom of her oversized black shirt off and wraps it around the bleeding arm. It is now morning, but still early.
Sable rides her bike to the post office farthest away from the museum. She opens her backpack and looks at the doll. “It’s about time you get back home,” she says. She packs it in the box she carried. She rips a few pages out of her textbook and writes a note that reads, “You may know of this doll, which many say is haunted. This doll’s stuffing is made of trees from your forest. Its watchful powers run haywire in tropical Florida. Please handle with care.”
She addresses the box to the head ranger of the Black Forest National Park, Schwarzwald. Sable places the box on the counter. The staff member notices her arm and asks, “You ok?” Sable doesn’t know how to answer. “No,” she thinks. “My best friend died.” She responds, “I’m ok.” He looks at the box. “You’re going to need a return address on that,” he says. She doesn’t want to put her home address on it. Sable writes her deceased grandparents’ old address on the box and pushes it back across the counter.
Sable walks out of the post office. She sobs. She notices that the black shirt bandage is glossy. Her bleeding has not stopped. Sable gets on her bicycle and rides to the hospital. “I guess this will leave a literal scar,” she thinks.