Poppets

The Players Introduced

The house, such as it remains, is now quite far from the reach of any but the most determined. Those who made it their home are now dispersed throughout the world. Should you meet them, in bars or restaurants, or even walking down the streets of their new suburban climes, they will invariably deny the events I am about to relate. You may find all of us discussed here, sometimes living together, sometimes living apart. But you will not find them under the names I have described here, for they either changed them, or I have reworked them into ciphers in the interest of preserving what remains of their privacy. But these events are true: though they happened a long time ago-- except for the last piece of it, which is a recent development. Even this, if you find us, we will deny. However, the verity of this account, gathered carefully and scrutinized closely, can only be asserted so strongly before the whole phantasm becomes unbelievable. But this story is true, as much as it can be, for it happened to me long ago.

You may not remember me, for my fortunes have risen and fallen with the tidal flow of the world. Yes, I was rich at the time, having come into some money by way of deceased ancestors. And I was on the upwards stroke of my career, having began making a small line of plastic dinosaur toys. These classic toys you may remember: they were patterned not after any sensible application of modern paleontology, but existed due to the commonality of experience of young and old alike. These dinosaurs were classically modeled, like something from an old claymation movie. The nostalgia factor alone worked well in convincing parents to buy the toys. So it was on the plastic backs on ancient beasts and the hard work of ancestors that I found myself wealthy enough to own the mansion.

If one viewed it from the air I suppose it might look something like a dollhouse. And it seemed, after a short time, that some greater power was indeed playing with all who lived there as if they were dolls. This thought proved terrifying, at first, but the greater thought, that nothing controlled or conducted our lives, became what truly chilled us to the bones.

It was early september, with the first leaves turning into gold covering of the landscape, when I moved into the house. I brought with me my young first wife, Jacinta Florez an heiress whose fortunes nearly doubled my own profits, two friends who I had engaged to live with me as servants, and a woman, Gilda Venturas, whom I had designs on to become my mistress. Each of my two friends, of course, had designs on each of the women in our company-- producing of course the drama and intensity that so few people living in such close intensity only can.

How can I describe these people and do justice to their personalities? To their appearances at the time? How can I accurately track how they spoke, how they felt, how we all were within the house? Even in the best of memoirs, that set out with the clearest of purposes to capture the past, there is only a sliver of the real. We organize our lives as fiction. All past, all memory is just a compilation. I do not know that what I present is true, though I pour over the pictures of our time, and have deep belief in my memory, which has not proved faulty, as yet.

Florez, as I called her, not truly believing such luck in landing so dutiful and so wealthy a wife, was one of the prettiest women I ever laid my sight on. She had what one might call, if one did not delight in the aspects of all shapes with which one might be pleasured, the same drawn out figure as any starlet or pin up girl. Her breasts were not so large as to become distracting, but fell firmly into the grasp of a single palm. Her hips had not widened, as they later would, with her children. I had, at that time, many designs there, as I believed firmly that I would need children in order to pass only my company and family name. I cannot remember the true color of her hair, that hardly seeming as important to me, but I suppose it must have been raven black when we started.

By contrast, and much shorter, was Miss Gilda, as we called her. My wife was very tall, towering over me at about six feet, like some amazonian caught as a prize in war. But Miss Gilda was short, and stocky. Her breasts were large, proportionate to her frame, and her hair was a tangled mess of orange-red that dangled down to her buttocks. Staring at it, as I perhaps too often did, reminded me of an old print I once saw, by a surrealist. It was supposed to be a copy of Vermeer’s Lacemaker, but had come out as a depiction of the artist’s sister, naked, bending over and about to be penetrated by several imperial phalluses. The sublimity of the artistic moment, it must be noted, is that in the frozen time of the painting the young girl is never exploited: she is only about to become thus violated. Each time I stared at the round, slightly plump, and pleasantly short figure of Miss Gilda, I seemed to be ensnared in this very same moment.

It is to be supposed, I think, that each woman knew that I was merely using them for the ends of my own ambition. But when we moved into that house we all seemed happy enough. Even my two friends, with eyes for each of my women, were grateful for the chance to get away from the mundanity of the world. They had the fortune to discover the place, and to set the house up for our living, before I departed the corporate boardroom of my toy company to live there. Roman was the oldest of my acquaintances, and we shared a deep bond going back to childhood, when I had stepped in to save him from the teasing of other children. Of course, in the intervening years, he had repaid this debt numerous times, having decided at that moment, when I took a punch to the jaw meant for him, that he would become my bodyguard. After that moment he devoted his life to protection and security, though I do not suppose I know what he did in those scant few off hours he was afforded-- and I cannot place his whereabouts now. I suppose the house robbed him of any desire to be connected to the past. That I do not do the same is only out of desire to allow the world to know that story: and perhaps to warn them away from the house that so untimely ripped apart our little company.

The last of our train was Robert Dollins, a latecomer into my life, who had been invaluable as a business adviser. He had come to the business of the house with trepidation, but also with eyes for Miss Gilda. He was always, it seemed, tripping over himself and others, all in order to please some small whim of the woman. It was on this premise, indeed, that he eventually agreed to the moving in of the small group. If she had not asked him, and I suppose she did in some small moment, her hands laced with his, her eyes looking up and pleading, I doubt that he would have moved forward and bought the house-- he had hated it the first time he laid upon it. He hated the house just as Roman loved it. But, acquiescing to the demands of his paramour, he begrudgingly moved the project forward.