Lamentings for a Puppet

It was a pity, really, that she had to go like that, all worn and broken from the inside out.

She wasn’t always sure why she kept doing it, though it tended to pain her. It wasn’t for the audience: her viewers were a select, frightening crowd. It wasn’t for the applause. No one applauds for that sort of thing.

So why? She could never give a truly good reason. She supposed that it was for security, although that excuse is widely seen as ridiculous.

She’d fallen into this trap years ago. The stage, the dancing, the smiles on their faces made her feel good about her little act. At the time it was addictive and different; now she found it difficult to leave this life.

Her name was Shadow Puppet, or at least that was what she thought it was. She couldn’t remember her birth name. Attached to arms and legs were very fine strings, and she could never see what was at the other end. At first she had failed to realize their existence, accrediting her flawless dancing as her own talent, rather than the jerking of a puppet master. There was a day when she stopped to analyze her actions, and then the strings became obvious to her, a gory fascination something like that of a terrible fire. The strings attached themselves somewhere under her skin, and sometimes they hurt when they were pulled. She was dressed in a bright red dress that frilled and fluffed in a most embarrassing manner, with her face painted white and a smile painted around her mouth in a perpetual grin, and her eyes were painted over to be a brilliant blue, rather than the melancholy brown that was her natural color. She thought she looked like a fool, but she’d been that way for years, from a young child to a young woman, and at first it was somehow natural.

Then rose the day when she wanted to change.

When she tried to walk away, someone pulled the strings, and she cried out in pain as she was jerked above the ground, her body limp and beyond her control. She was hung by her strings on a peg while more strings were placed in the top of her head, and the more she tried to leave, the more it hurt.

She was a puppet, she knew it then, made to dance before an audience that terrified her, an audience she loathed with all her wooden heart. Slowly, as time went on, she tried less and less to make her audience happy, and more and more to simply be done with the show. She began to fade, as all toys tend to; her clothing tore and her limbs became chipped and frail. She couldn’t make the same pleasures that she once did. Eventually, as all toys do, she broke. She was cast aside, used out of her worth, and left to rot. She began to wonder if the things she’d done to please the audience were really worth it… now that it was too late to change.