The Motion of Puppets by Keith Donohue

Author:Keith Donohue
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781250057211
Publisher: Picador

15

She died a second time.

The Quatre Mains brought out the puppet from the bell jar and stood him on a tree stump to oversee the metamorphoses.

First, they deposed the Queen. The Irishman drove a wooden stake through her chest and fastened her to a post. Two farmhands—a lanky teenage girl and a towheaded boy with earnest blue eyes—bent a section of chicken wire into a form about twice the size of a human trunk. Then they began laying down sheets of paper that had been moistened in a thick slurry of paste. As they worked on the new larger-than-life queen, they would often consult the doll pinned like a butterfly, checking to make sure they were creating a facsimile of the original.

The rest of the puppets were similarly fixed to a spot. The Three Sisters hung by their wires on the low branch of a chokecherry tree, and Finch and Stern fashioned copies of each in papier-mâché. The remnants of a lightweight barrel provided the base for a new Mr. Firkin. Striplings and branches were collected to create the full-size Good Fairy. All the others had been lashed or secured into stationary positions while the puppeteers crafted new versions, tall as people with jointed legs and arms. At dusk, the humans quit for the day, heading off to the comfort of the farmhouse, joshing as the cool air settled in, the smell of fresh bread and a bubbling pot of stew filling the air.

Scattered in front of the barn doors, the puppets were left alone, each next to its replica. Unable to move and wary of being heard, they spoke with one another in hushed whispers.

“Is everyone okay?” Mr. Firkin asked.

“I don’t like this place,” said Noë. “Everything is too big and scary.”

“Not to mention this infernal stake straight through my heart,” said the Queen. “If I had a heart.”

“Ugh,” said Nix. “What is happening to us?”

Swinging from the branch like a Salem witch, Olya spoke with a world-weariness. “We are being transformed. Made over to fit in with all the others here. A change will do you good, Nixie.”

“These are our bodies,” said the Devil. He ogled the shapes on the ground. “Getting ready for our souls. It is not every day that you get to see the next step on life’s journey.”

Kay stole a peek at the unfinished papier-mâché torso not four feet from where she hung, bound to a fence post with a lash of baling wire. A river of melancholy threaded its way from puppet to puppet. She remembered her first days in the Back Room in Québec and the freedom they enjoyed there during the long, dark nights. “What do you mean about our souls? Are they to inhabit these new forms?”

The Devil’s wooden joints creaked in the soft breeze. He was more hideous than usual, captured and trussed like some wild thing ready for the slaughter. “My guess is that they will destroy the old in order to create the new. Not the first time this has happened to me.

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