Annalise had no idea what happened. One minute, she was strolling out the door with a Rocky Robot fighter tucked beneath her jacket. The next…falling. Shouting, her voice sounding small and airy.

She fell into a pile of plush and sat back, looking up as her jaw dropped open. She was back in the toy store. But not really. Annalise was inside a crane game, among dozens of plush toys. One of the plush toys. “What the hell!” She shouted, her voice echoing in the glass box she was in.

“Oh, how fun! It’s been a while since some petty thief tripped my protection spell.” A woman wearing a red store smock said. She approached with bright eyes, tucking her hair behind her ears as she knelt to get a better look at Alien!Annalise.

“What the hell!” The little doll shouted at the too-giant face. “Get me out of here!”

“With pleasure!” The employee said, pulling out two quarters and dropping them into the game. Brilliant lights and booming sounds came to life, shaking Annalise to her core.

“Wait, what are you doing!”

“The claw is your master. The claw will decide who will stay and who will go!” The woman said with glee, grabbing the joystick.

Annalise craned her neck back and saw, in the towering ceiling of her new world, the dangling red plastic claw. It shook, moved, gliding on its support braces. She gasped. “Not like that!”

“There’s only two ways out of this machine, little toy.”

Unsteady on her feet and on the pile of plush, Annalise tripped trying to maneuver away from the red scoopers. But neither the claw nor the woman cared.

“One, is the traditional way.” The claw suddenly dropped and Annalise dove with all her might to avoid the falling machine. It grazed her ankle on its way to grab a plush elephant head. Annalise spun around, watching the claw devour the elephant like a plastic dragon. It began to rise, dragging the gray toy with it. Its sturdy claws held for a while before suddenly shaking loose, letting the elephant nearly fall right on top of her.

“Let’s try that again.” Another set of quarters. Another round of the “game.”

“Hang on, what’s the other way!” Annalise said, trying to stand up, to make her way to the corner of the box. But her foot found the perfect hole between plushes, sending her tumbling into a void like quicksand. She was stuck, trapped in a morass of toys. She looked again with terror at the crane hovering above her.

“The other way” The employee said, “is that you have to survive, until you earn back the value of the toy you tried to steal.”

Rocky Robot Fighters were $34.99. Doing some quick math, Annalise’s eyes went wide. “I have to survive seventy tries?”

The woman laughed cruelly. “Well, don’t steal my toys!”

The crane dropped right on top of Annalise. She cried out, pushed with all her

might to keep the red claws from grabbing her. But that proved to be the wrong move. Touching the claw, her strength gave out. It was not merely that she couldn’t overcome the mechanical monster, it was that it sapped her. She went limp, slumping forward. Lifeless. Squeezed and contorted by the scoopers, she was dragged out of the pile of toys.

But as the crane began to careen toward the exit shoot, its claws slipped open. Annalise fell once again, down again onto the soft pillows of her fellow toys.

The employee sighed. “Can you believe these things are programmed to do things like that?”

Annalise began to sluggishly reinhabit her body, slowly sitting up in a daze. Maybe it was better to let the crane win, she thought. It would be more humiliating, but it might be a quicker way out of this nightmare.

“I should mention,” the employee said, “if someone wins you, then you’ll be stuck as you are. It wouldn’t be fair for someone to spend all that time and money to catch you only for you to turn into a boring human again. The only way out as the woman you were is if you survive.”

Annalise slumped, sighing as she looked up into the fluorescent lights at the roof on the box. There, hidden in the light was the claw. The claw was her master. The claw decided if she would stay or if she would go.

All because she was too cheap to pay for one lousy doll.