Poppets in Flight

“We can make that a reality,” the shadow-voice said. I hoped that no one had heard that, but focused only on making sure I could get away. I wanted to bite down, to cause a distraction, but instead I let each of my friends finish in me.

‘We have to get out of this house, now,” screamed my wife. I got up, apparently not under the spell of the malevolent spirit anymore, and tried to run for the door. I found it locked.

“You locked us in, remember?” Roman was not pleased.

“You could at least enjoy what I just did,” I said, even though I had not enjoyed the action completely.

“His was better.” Roman nodded at Robert, who smiled, then grimaced.

“How do we get out of here?” I asked. Here is where my wife truly came to my rescue. She looked at me and at the dollhouse. The spirit seemed to have disappeared, though that hybrid doll still hung above us in the room. She pointed at the dolls.

“Can you still control the dolls?”

I didn’t know, but it was worth a try. I lunged for the dollhouse. It fell off the table, and the attic broke off. At that same moment we heard a horrendous sound from upstairs, along with yet another loud clap of thunder. Lightning seemed to be striking all around the house, like an electrical cage. Boom after boom after boom was the soundtrack in the background. I grabbed the shadow-doll and threw it into the fire, the same way I had promised I already had. It was only then that Miss GIlda realised I had lied to her. She began to hit me, to claw at me. She dug her fingernails into my face, leaving three long marks that scar my visage to this day.

“Stop, we need to get out of here,” said Robert, as he and Roman pulled her away from me.

“Unlock the door, unlock the door, unlock the door,” my wife said, stuck on an endless loop. I did so, and I made sure to move our dolls out of the house, down through the hallway. I then pocketed each doll.

“We need to destroy these,” Gilda said.

“What if that kills us?” asked Roman. I pocketed the dolls, tried the door, and we raced outside.

“We have to get the cops,” I said. We stopped for a moment, didn’t quite catch our breaths, and all nodded in agreement. We would need to go find the Coxs for help. I jumped in my car, and the rest of the household followed. As I fired up the engine, I couldn’t help but exclaiming “I can’t believe you were both in my mouth.”

“You didn’t hate it,” said Roman. Robert nodded his agreement.

“And we all read that book you wrote” my wife added. “You have this fascination with becoming a woman-- hell, there’s that story where you wrote us all having dicks and you gave yourself a vagina.”

“I liked that one best,” said Miss Gilda. “But that was another act of control, wasn’t it?”

“What do you mean, control? He had us all fucking him,” Robert pointed out.

“But he was the center of attention. Always. Giving up control is asserting a kind of control,” Miss Gilda said.

“Kind of like a masochist is really the one in control?” asked Roman.

“Shouldn’t we be driving away?” I asked. “Not discussing my fantasy life?”

“Hey, you put us in it, we get to discuss it,” said Roman. “But we need to get out of here.” So I stomped my foot on the gas pedal and drove as fast as I could down the winding driveway, out to the highway, and sped all the way into town, where I stopped at the police station. We hopped out and began knocking on the door. But it was late in the evening, my having returned from that very town having happened in the afternoon. It being a small town there was no dispatch, no overnight operator of the police office yet. That the town would soon be getting one was one of the conditions of the Parisienne Toy factory being built in the town.

“Do you know where the officers live?” I asked the others. They shook their heads.

“Wouldn’t you be the one to know? We only come to town to shop and run errands for you. You’re the one who has relations with the town itself,” they all said in their own way.

“We’ll have to wait for them,” said Robert. “This town doesn’t even have a payphone.”

“Well, we can’t just wait in the car,” said Miss Gilda, pointing at the Cup O Stars diner. “We might as well go in and get some food.”

“I bet we can call the Coxs from there, too,” said Roman. So, with that plan in mind, we all went into the diner, which was-- if possible-- more stereotypically like a small town diner than any I had seen before or have seen since. The whole place was just one long counter, with about five booths by the window side. There was a small jukebox, broken, which seemed constantly to be playing a skipping record of some instrumental variety. It sounded vaguely, to me, like a cross between Nina Simone’s version of “I Put a Spell on You” and Dusty Springfield’s “Spooky” with just a tiny hint of a classical, almost Wagnerian leitmotif.

“Never been able to stop it, day or night,” said Charlene, the waitress. She had a mole on her upper lip, without which she may have looked pretty. I couldn’t help but admire the shape of her backside as she walked away after taking our order. I hadn’t felt really hungry and so ordered a simple english muffin, the staple breakfast food found in diner’s everywhere. It had always been this way since sometime in my childhood, when one diner’s food had come to me clearly undercooked but no one believed me. They all at the food anyway, but I felt sick. Since then I usually stuck to very simply food when in a diner. I had only lately made a concession to consuming the kind of depressingly black and usually very weak coffee all diners serve: I only did so because it seemed appropriate to appreciate the kind of squalor after reading an internalizing Naked Lunch and On the Road, along with other beatific works like “Howl” and “A Coney Island of the Mind”.