Submissions are open to one piece of fiction completed for coursework during the last calendar year. Submissions should not exceed 20 pages. Koletta DiDio wrote the 1st place submission in the Fiction Category for the 2026 President’s Writing Awards.
About Koletta
Koletta Persephone DiDio is graduating in May 2026 with degrees in Creative Writing, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Digital Media. She was recently published in Bitterbrush Literary Magazine. A painter, a journalist, a barista, and fiction writer, Koletta has a weakness for tragic mythology, cursed swords, lamp posts, and sentences that take too long.
Winning Manuscript – Puppet Tears
The old community theatre smells of mildew and crayons. The scrim’s a moth-eaten fire-hazard, and a speaker whines in protest somewhere.
Knees cracking, I crouch behind the puppet stage and adjust the crooked jaw of my handcrafted George Washington puppet, made of felt wool, fishing wire, and a jaw that doesn’t quite open. I do this twice a week for $12.15 an hour, and a vague sense of historical integrity that erodes faster than the glue on these puppets.
“And thus,” I say in my best Founding Father but Make It Accessible to Toddlers voice, “General Washington heroically crosses the Delaware River in the dead of night—”
From the audience, a seven-year-old heckles me. “Where’s the dragon?”
There is, tragically, no dragon in the Revolutionary War. I know this because I’m getting my PhD in history. And I read books unlike this tiny goblin with peanut butter on her face.
Backstage, I swap out Washington for Jefferson, whose left arm is missing because someone (me) stepped on it last week. I glued a quill to his stump. History lives.
“Behold,” I drone, “the signing of the Declaration of Independence…”
I pause, searching for the next line. I never find it, but it’s said anyway: “A bold act of treason.” Obviously, the puppet’s jaw doesn’t move because I don’t pull the string. It’s just hanging there, lopsided, threadbare. It must’ve been muscle memory; I must be more tired than I knew, talking without
realizing it.
When the lights come up, the applause is sparse—pity claps, thin as rain on tin. A child with pigtails approaches me. She announces: “That was bad.”
I nod. “Yes. Yes, it was.”
She skips off. I consider skipping off a cliff. Instead, I take the puppets into the frigid storage unit where I hang them up and glare at each in succession.
They stare from their hangers: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Benedict. My token female puppet is still dressed as Guinevere in the King Arthur costume bin. I fixed up what I could, but they’re each stuck in various states of decay. I mutter about the scams of academia, when I hear a whisper—
“Joe.”
I stop mid-pack and turn. Washington is hanging where I left him, but his posture is different, slouched.
I squint at him, but nothing. He hangs there, glassy-eyed, mouth a little too wide, as if in mid-thought.
“Super. Sleep-deprivation hallucinations. I love that for me.” I toss a roll of duct tape toward the storage bin. Miss. Naturally.
“You dropped your line. Again.”
Just spoken, flat and casual, a guy commenting on your set at open mic night.
But the worst part—it’s my voice, again. Not a squeak or an echo. My voice. Like something put a sock puppet on my larynx and made it do impressions.
I back away.
Washington—little bastard—still doesn’t move. But I swear, as I trip toward the exit, his jaw clicks into place.
My apartment smells of burnt coffee grounds and the vague dread of never finishing my dissertation. I head straight for the medicine cabinet, where I find expired Tylenol, Tums, Nyquil, and vodka in a plastic bottle.
“Cheers, Founding Father,” I sigh, unscrewing both caps. I pour the Nyquil directly into the vodka bottle. The vodka hisses; it doesn’t want to be part of this.
“Same,” I agree. It burns as I down it, gagging.
A lesser man might stop here, but I am not a lesser man. I am a PhD candidate with $63 in his bank account and nothing to come home to, so I drink again and stare into nothing with an empty that hums. That haunts.
I don’t want much: just one person to look at me and not see a walking thesis. Not a project. Just me, and maybe still want me. The words aren’t said aloud, but they land heavy in the room as if I’ve spoken them anyway, as if something heard.
The last thing I remember is the faint, echoing creak of strings pulling taut.
And something dragging across the floorboards.
I wake from an effective abuse of substances to the blaring alarm of doom blinking from my phone: WINNIE THE POO – ADVISOR MEET, 8:00AM.
Professionalism: I embody it as I launch myself from bed.
My advisor Winnie exists in a very specific way. She speaks in citations. Color-codes her color-coded system. Corrects her own typo in a text with a follow-up asterisk and apology. Winnie has a rod so far up her ass she could’ve been one of the university’s threadbare puppets, a muppet in prego-orthopedics. And yet, for someone so ruthlessly precise, she exists adjacent to reality. She forgets what day it is constantly. One time, she spent ten minutes explaining medieval bloodletting techniques while walking into the men’s restroom without noticing.
I don’t know what to do with her. That’s why I bring her coffee every week.
I skid into the building ten minutes late, clutching her usual order like a peace offering and bracing for the disappointed look that makes you feel as if you’ve run over a dog or misquoted Cicero.
I throw open the office door like the Kool-Aid man of academia, holding the coffee as a white
flag.
Winnie’s seated, spine straight, hair braided with geometric precision. Her tablet glows before
her. Her red nails tap out a steady metronome to patient thought.
“Sorry I’m late,” I sit and offer the coffee. “Decaf. Two sugars. One moral compromise.” Winnie looks up, eyes a little glassy from whatever footnote rabbit hole she just emerged from.
But when she sees the cup, her expression brightens. “You remembered,” she says with a shy smile.
“Haunted by it,” I say. Our fingers brush as she takes the cup. Neither of us mentions the way we hesitate.
She sips, then sets the coffee aside and turns her tablet around. “I was annotating your chapter.
This section on puppets as emotional stand-ins? It’s the strongest thing you’ve written.”
I raise a brow, caught off guard. “Thanks. That’s the heart of it: puppets aren’t creepy because they’re fake. They’re creepy because they’re close. Too close. A hollow thing pretending to feel is worse than something that doesn’t feel at all.”
She nods. “The uncanny valley.”
“Deeper. It’s not about being off—it’s about being right. You flinch because you recognize it.
Because you’re watching something echo you, badly.” She tilts her head. “That’s very sad.”
“I’m fun at parties.”
She smiles—small, lopsided. “You’re not hiding in this draft the way you usually do. But…” she scrolls to the margin and makes a note. “Your metaphors are too soft. You need to risk more.”
That lands harder than I expected. It feels personal. She knows I’m hiding something, and isn’t going to name it unless I do.
I glance away, unsure where to put my eyes, and they land—unfortunately—on the curve of her belly. Her cardigan stretches just slightly over it.
She catches the look. Doesn’t flinch. “You don’t have to act weird about it. Everyone keeps asking if it’s twins. It’s not. Just someone else’s baby.”
“Right,” I say. “Your sister’s kid. You’re just the, uh—temporary vessel.” “Surrogate,” she corrects. “But sure. Vessel works.”
“Biblical,” I grimace. “Love that.”
I try to smile. But something makes me queasy. It’s like watching a movie out of sync. Seeing her pregnant with someone else’s future makes my skin feel too tight.
She scrolls down. “What are you working on next?”
I should lie. Pretend I’m researching something with enough Latin in the title to sound employable.
Instead, I say, “I’m… experimenting. Been writing puppet scripts. Not historical, for once, but conversations. Stuff I didn’t say, or should’ve said. Real moments. Filtered through felt.”
Winnie blinks, visibly intrigued. “Like anthropological artistry? Jungian psychology?” “Like emotional masochism but with string.”
She laughs, delighted, missing the edge in my voice. “That’s kind of brilliant.”
“It’s kind of something. But I’m out of ideas, so it’s this or quoting Freud unironically.”
She nods as if that’s a normal crossroads to hit in academia. “Let me know if you need references on performative shadow work. Or help with anything.”
She returns to her notes. I sit there, watching her annotate with surgical intensity, and the scatterbrained charm of someone who’ll probably walk out without her shoes. She’s infuriating, sweet, and smarter than anyone else. This woman who I can’t stop orbiting, though we both know advisor/ advisee dynamics are… ethically muddy.
I don’t want much—just one person. Unfortunately, that one person happens to be Winnie. And Winnie, right now, isn’t one person. She’s one-and-a-half, carrying a future that doesn’t belong to either of us. And I have no idea what to do with any of that.
But when she smiles again, quiet, addictive, it tugs on a string in my heart.
The memory of the puppet talking clings like cold sweat. Quick. Unnatural. Easy to write off, if I wanted to—which is easy enough. I’m overtired and over-caffeinated, and currently teaching a 100-level survey course to undergrads who think the Cold War was fought in Antarctica.
Class ends and I bolt; I don’t have the emotional bandwidth today, not after the maybe-puppet-talking breakdown. Clearly, I am a man on the edge. A man with office hours I deeply do not want to hold. The TA office is barely a closet, but I flick off the lights, drop into my chair, and open my laptop so the screen glows on my face like a confessional.
There’s something like a knock on the door, but it’s faint enough, padded with something.
Probably a student with the world’s saddest mitten. Or someone bumping the door with a backpack. Three polite taps I shake my head at. I have a thesis to write.
“In traditional performance spaces, puppets have long functioned as human decoys—emotional stand-ins meant to absorb, reflect, or distort the actions and impulses of those who control them. It is not the artificiality of puppets that disturbs audiences, but the intimacy of recognition.”
It’s fine, academic. It’s also me in a sentence. Because if anyone’s a hollow emotional decoy in a button-up shirt, it’s yours truly. Underneath the jargon, it says what I’m afraid of: maybe what scares us isn’t what puppets aren’t—but what they almost are. Like mirrors that blink back.
There’s another knock at the door, a collection of chaotic knocks—unmistakably one of my students.
I freeze, praying for the illusion of absence. But there is no salvation, because the door creaks
open.
“Hi? Pro Joe? Professor?”
Of course, it’s Declan who opens the door.
Declan always smells like Axe body spray and misplaced confidence. He stands in the doorway
squinting. His hoodie reads Historical Memes Club, and he’s chewing on the drawstrings. I wish I was a professor. I could threaten to fail him until he left me alone. But he takes my blank stare for encouragement and asks, “Are we, like, allowed to use Wikipedia if we just cite it?”
“Declan. The syllabus literally says, ‘Do not cite Wikipedia.’ In bold. In red. With a skull emoji.” Because I’m approachable. Relatable. Hip.
“Oh, okay,” he says. “But, like, what if the Wikipedia page is right?” “I will walk into the sea, Declan.”
He opens his mouth again.
I stand. “Office hours are canceled. Indefinitely. Tell your classmates I’m dead.”
Declan looks concerned. He shifts awkwardly—when the office door swings open behind him, banging against the wall so hard that it makes my teeth rattle.
“What the hell?” Declan jumps. “That—was that the wind?” “Probably,” I say. “This building hates hope.”
Nodding, he gives me a weird look and steps into the hall.
“Just do what you can, Declan,” I rub my hand over my face with a sigh. I close the door—lock it
—and sit back before the glowing document like it might explain me to myself.
The theater is empty, just the old lights buzzing like a swarm of dying bees and the stale smell of dust and fabric glue I shut the storage door behind me with my foot, arms full of limp, felt-limbed bodies. Washington’s hat falls off. Jefferson’s damn stump catches in the strap of my bag.
“Christ, you’re needy today,” I grumble, untangling them one by one and laying them gently on the edge of the stage. It feels too much like laying out a funeral procession.
The last one is new. He slumps immediately, head listing to the side, like he’s exhausted just existing. His sweater’s still bunched awkwardly under his chin, the seam puckered like a scar. One button hangs on by a thread. Literally. I grab the sewing kit and plop down beside him.
I don’t know why I made him look like me. It was a joke. But jokes tend to stick when you’re alone too long.
I pick up Guinevere next—or what was Guinevere. Now, she’s a shameful projection of an
absent-minded genius. As I adjust her cardigan—Winnie’s cardigan, in miniature—I catch the scent of her laundry detergent still stuck to my sleeves from when I saw her this morning. I close my eyes. Breathe it in, then out. It doesn’t help.
She’s getting bigger every time I see her. The curve of her stomach is unavoidable now—like a moon in orbit, tugging at the tides of every conversation.
I don’t know how to look at her anymore. Not when she presses a hand absently to her belly mid-sentence, like it’s reflex. Like she’s already wired to protect something that isn’t hers. I can’t tell if it’s noble or terrifying.
Some small part of me—traitorous and yearning—wants to press my hand there, too. Just to feel it. Just to see what it’s like to be included in something. But I’m not. I’m not included. And I shouldn’t want to be. She’s my advisor. She’s off-limits. And she’s not even singular anymore. Not just herself.
I braid Puppet Winnie’s hair with slow fingers. Puppet Joe sits across from her now, hunched like he knows what’s coming.
“I don’t want much,” I whisper, half to myself. “Just one person who gets it. Who sees me and doesn’t look away.”
I shake it off, stand, arrange the rest. The usual suspects: Benedict, Hamilton, Washington. They don’t seem interested tonight.
past.
Only Puppet Joe’s head turns slightly—loose neck, weak thread—but it happens just as I walk
I stop. Frown. And then I dismiss it to gravity, a loose seam—nothing.
But as I kneel to tape up the backdrop, something stupid I scribbled on butcher paper, a crude
mock-up of Winnie’s office, I hear a knock—three quick raps on the theater door.
I freeze, heart spiking. It’s probably nothing, probably a broom handle shifting in the corner, or a
draft.
head.
shame.
Ignoring it, I sit cross-legged on the dusty stage and face my pathetic cast. Puppet Joe tilts his
The silence folds over me. I pick up the script, the one I wrote last night in a haze of espresso and
“Okay,” I whisper. “Let’s try it again.”
I wake up on the couch in a stillness that feels wrong. No memory of lying down, no real sense of time. The room’s dim—too dim. Saturated in a twilight that doesn’t belong to any hour I recognize.
Something brushes faintly against the door. A light knock. Too light to be wood. Too deliberate to be nothing. Three times too many.
I sit up fast—too fast. The room blurs, and in the corner of my eye, I catch them. Five shapes. Perched on the windowsill like malformed birds. Puppets. My puppets. They don’t move. They don’t have to.
Puppet Joe is closest—his head angled, as if he’s eavesdropping on a thought. Behind him, the others hover in a loose huddle, their felt limbs drooping with gravity. Their buttons gleam faintly, catching light that shouldn’t be there.
“Joe.”
I flinch. Not from the volume—it’s quiet. From the way it’s spoken. Not squeaky. Not fake. My voice—but unspooled, thread pulled from somewhere deeper. Pitched low in the way I use when I’m talking for Washington or King Arthur. I try to sit up, but my limbs feel sluggish.
I want to laugh. I want to throw something. And I think, stupidly: Tulpa theory. Animism. Liminal object theory. Projection as self-regulation. I read that paper last semester and laughed at it.
“You made us,” one murmurs, “and you made us want.” My breath sticks.
“You gave us shape. You gave us her,” another says, sweeter, still in my voice. The puppet that used to be Guinevere twitches slightly. Her felt hands are painted red, though I don’t remember doing it.
“I didn’t give you anything real,” I whisper. “You’re props. Bits of string and glue.” “Un-life is crueler,” Puppet Joe says, his mouth stretched sadly. Or maybe he’s smiling.
Then, from somewhere among them—maybe Jefferson, maybe Hamilton—a sound. Wet.
Guttural. A hiccup.
Crying. The puppets are crying.
Not loud. Not sobbing. Just a tiny trembling noise and the slow, ridiculous drip of one clear bead down Puppet Joe’s cheek.
“We want to give you something,” Puppet Joe says. “Because you gave us everything.” “I’ve treated you like shit,” I whisper.
“You still chose us,” they say. “You made something instead of giving up. You breathed something in and we caught it.”
The silence that follows is expectant and heavy. I’m supposed to say something, but I don’t know
the line.
There’s a creak from behind me and I whirl around, falling off the couch and knocking my head
against coffee table. By the time I blink it away, vowing to NEVER drink Vodquil again—The sill is empty. Just the window. Just the dark.
The window’s banging wakes me. I sit up, eyes gritty, head pounding. The room is gray with early light, cold and damp because the window is open a crack, just enough for the wind to push it open and slam it against the frame.
The lock is snapped clean through. Metal twisted like someone yanked it from the inside, jagged as a broken tooth. I stare at it for a long time. I don’t touch it.
Class is a haze. I mumble through a lecture, hand out a quiz, avoid eye contact. Most students flee the second I dismiss them.
I pack up slowly, hoping everyone just goes.
Most do—not Declan. Declan just waits. He ambles up to the front, scrolling on his phone, grinning. As if I haven’t spent the whole semester pretending not to fantasize setting his essays on fire.
“Hey, uh, quick thing,” he says, scratching his neck. “So I had a meeting with Dr. Berman yesterday? About my grade?”
I stiffen. “Okay.”
“And, like…” he squints. “I kinda mentioned that I’ve asked you for help and you haven’t really… y’know. Responded.”
My mouth goes dry.
He keeps going. “I didn’t say anything bad! Just that you’re, like, super busy. I said you probably just forgot. But Berman got all weird. Asked if I’d kept records of our messages and stuff.” He shrugs. “I guess he’s, like, checking if your grading’s ‘fair’ or whatever. So… heads up?”
I stare at him. “You told the department chair I’ve been ignoring you?”
He frowns. “No! I mean—not like that. I said you were sorta hard to get a hold of sometimes, and he asked if I thought that was impacting my grade. And I said, I mean, maybe?” He smiles, completely sincere. “You’re not mad, right? I figured it’s no big deal.”
I stand there, heart thudding, viscerally aware that if the department decides to make me an example, they won’t need much. Just one mistake, one bad email. One Declan.
I slump against the whiteboard, drag a hand through my hair. Then, quiet and flat: “I’m going to strangle him with his own chewed-up hoodie strings.”
The words hang in the air like a promise I didn’t mean to make.
Winnie emails me asking if I’m free to help her haul a borrowed anatomy model out of storage in the old med building—something she volunteered for her birthing class. She says she can’t lift heavy things in her ‘delicate condition’—her words, not mine—then added a smiling emoji, which in Winnie-
speak is a scream for help. I say yes, because I’m a coward with a weakness for dark eyes, academic precision, and deeply avoidable emotional situations.
She’s waiting outside the building, holding two coffees.
“Decaf,” she says brightly, handing me one. “I remembered. See? I am capable of social functioning.”
I nod, taking the cup, and almost manage a smile.
Her nails are painted green today—I’ve never NOT seen her nails red before, but they tap against her cup, tipped deep forest-green, oddly jerky. She’s got a few wisps of hair coming loose from that military-grade braid, curling around her face.
“You take decaf,” I say finally, voice low. “I would never.”
“Oh,” she says, tilting her head, thoughtful. “I’ll remember next time.”
She leads the way, and I don’t realize how my face softened, how I’m smiling until I catch my reflection in the glass door.
Her nails were green. The same green as my eyes—she memorized them. Absent-minded, reality-adjacent Winnie who loses her pencils behind her ear noticed me.
The med building basement is colder than expected. Not cool—concrete-walled, morgue-adjacent cold that seeps up and into your kneecaps.
Winnie leads the way, her phone flashlight catching on metal edges and half-forgotten lab models stacked like corpses. Her braid swings with geometric precision, but there’s a jumpiness to her I’ve never sen before.
She finds the box near the floor. Gray, plastic, cracked near the handle. It’s marked ‘CHILDBIRTH: DEMO’ in faded Sharpie. She pries it open.
Inside is a torso. Silicone, vaguely human in a “don’t scare the undergrads” way. The stomach is designed to open like a magic trick.
“I’ve got it,” I whisper as she stands there for a moment too long.
“We’re practically the same thing.” She swallows. Her voice is steady, but she’s speaking taut, around a truth she doesn’t want to name, yet glancing at me like she’s hoping I’ll see it still.
I crouch beside her. “You’re not a vessel,” I say, correcting my own words from our last meeting. “Or some storage container. You’re just…Winnie.”
I lift the model. Something slips from the open belly and lands with a thud. We both freeze.
It’s a puppet. Felt, pallid, seams fraying. Its head is too large, the body half-finished, limbs curled in on themselves, as if it hasn’t decided what shape to be yet. Where the eyes should be are two rings of dark thread. A single strand runs from its chest into the model’s cavity—taut, glistening.
An woven umbilical cord.
Winnie jumps. “Creepy. Guess the theatre department borrowed it for a bit.”
I can’t answer. I’m still staring at the thread. The way it stretches, delicate and deliberate. “Too heavy?” she asks. I shake my head, snap the dummy shut, and tuck it under my arm.
Winnie touches my shoulder. Her hand lingers, fingers tapping erratically in a very un-Winnie way. She says with a small smile, green nails flashing as she tucks her hair back, “Thanks, Joe. ‘Just Winnie’. Still me. Still something human, right?”
“Mostly,” I say.
She laughs. I do not.
I stop by the theatre for my laptop charger. It’s locked, but I have a key. Perks of being the weird grad student who lives between office hours and off-off-Broadway puppet shows. The air is stale—fabric glue and faint mildew. Familiar, almost comforting.
I head down to the storage room beneath the stage, humming under my breath just to make the silence less clingy. The puppets are where I left them, thankfully. Except—
There’s one I don’t remember, but I definitely recognize. It’s slumped on the shelf, awkwardly propped. The felt’s rough, hastily stitched. The face is crooked. But the hoodie is unmistakable—gray, frayed at the edges, a crude patch on the chest. Declan.
My mouth dries. I reach for it—slowly, stupidly—and stop.
There’s something wrapped around its neck. Hoodie string tied in a messy bow. “I didn’t make you,” I whisper.
The puppet doesn’t move. None do. For once, they don’t say anything. “Stop it. This isn’t what I wanted, this isn’t what I said—”
I did say that, though, didn’t I? Strangle the poor Monster-fueled freshman by his hoodie strings. I look around the storage room, expecting something, but there’s only the quiet and the puppets.
I have to get out of here. Halfway up the stairs, I stop cold when the house lights turn on—not gradually with a click, but all all at once. Blinding. Stage lights flare to life above the boards, burning the theatre into visibility.
Declan hangs at center stage.
Fishing wire winds tight around his elbows—hoisting his arms outward and up, like a crucifix. Or a doll pulled upright mid-performance. His head slumps forward, chin to chest, face hidden in shadow.
Hoodie strings tight around his throat, biting into the skin.
His feet brush the floor as he sways enough to make the wire creak. There’s no blood or signs of a struggle, just the fishing wire’s weblike glint and Declan’s limp body posed in wait.
I don’t scream. Not because I’m brave, but because something worse catches my eye. Something’s watching from the audience. One puppet. Front row, alone.
I march over, teeth gritted, ready to rip it in half. But as I reach the row, I stop cold. It’s not Declan, or me in puppet form. It’s Winnie. Her braid, her cardigan, eyes stitched wide open and hands folded politely in her lap —the nails are green now.
I back away and the lights go dark again.
In the empty theatre, the echo of felted hands applaud as I race for the exit.
The office is chaos. Papers fly through the air, my hands shaking as I rifle through everything—old scripts, article drafts, scratched-up notes. Something that might explain it, or kill it, or both.
My phone’s wedged between my shoulder and jaw, ringing.
Voicemail. Again. “Winnie, call me back,” I say, breath short. “Please. Tell—tell me you’re okay.” I drop the phone onto the desk and dig deeper into the drawer. “They’re not just props. Not symbols. They’ve been listening this whole time.”
Scripts. Scrawled dialogue. My own voice—transcribed, repeated, turned by felt.
“Joe?”
I freeze.
Winnie’s standing in the doorway. She looks out of place in the fluorescent light, braid tight, cardigan buttoned wrong. She’s been working late again, I doubt she even saw I called.
“What happened?”
“I—are you okay?” I’m already crossing the room. “Are you hurt?” “What?”
“You’re safe,” I say, laugh too sharp. “Good. Good. Because Declan’s dead.” She blinks. “Dead?”
“He’s dead. At the theatre. Strung up. Elbows looped with fishing wire—like a goddamn marionette.” I mime it, jerky and quick. “Center stage.”
She steps back. “Joe… who would do that?”
I rake a hand through my hair. “They’ve been watching me. Following me. They move. They say things I’ve only said alone—”
“Joe,” she says again, voice rising. “Who is they?”
And it tears out of me before I can stop it. “The puppets—!”
Winnie flinches as if something grabbed her from the inside and yanked. “In—involuntary tic,” she whispers breathlessly. “Something to do with the pregnancy, I’m sure.”
‘I’m sure’ is never a phrase that’s been in Winnie’s vocabulary unless she’s sure—and she doesn’t sound sure, right now.
I reach out, but stop short. I don’t know what I’m reaching for. “I used you,” I whisper. “In the shows. I made a version of you. I didn’t mean to, but I—I said things to it. To you. And they remember.”
She looks up.
“I said I just wanted one person. You’re that person. But you’ve got someone else’s future taking up space in you, and I couldn’t figure out where I fit anymore. So I stitched myself in.”
Winnie doesn’t speak. I’ve said something irreversible—but her hand grips my arm, like I’m something solid to hold onto.
And in that practical, measured voice that I love, that’s so Winnie of her she says: “We need to go back to the theatre.”
The theater looks the same as always, but the door groans like it regrets letting us in. Winnie hesitates on the threshold. “This is where you found him?”
I nod but don’t stop. “Stay near the stage. I need the others.”
I don’t wait for her answer. I duck backstage and make for the storage room, throwing the door with more force than finesse. The air inside is dry and cold, the dark a second skin pressing in. The puppets are waiting. All the puppets—including the Declan, the Winnie, the me.
I collect them all and climb back up, limbs scraping wood. They land in a heap of thread and limbs where I toss the puppets down center stage.
Winnie’s voice floats up from the back: “Found the lights.”
With a heavy clunk, the house lights stutter to life, heaving a mechanical sigh.
I freeze. Because center stage is empty—no Declan, no body. But when I squint, I can make out the glimmer of two thin lines, vein-like hanging from the ceiling, the fishing wire.
He was here. I know he was.
Winnie hovers below the stage. She looks like she’s walked into the wrong room at a party and is too polite to leave. She says carefully, “Joe?” Her voice is wary now. Small.
I don’t answer. I don’t look at her. I don’t—
“I don’t care what they are. I don’t care that I made them. I’m burning all of it—every last scrap of cursed felt.” I gesture wildly. “They wanted to help me? Great. I’m cured. No more wishes. No more ghosts. No more handmade nightmares. Salt. Matches. Gasoline if I can find it. If not, I’ll light them with resentment and spite.”
I drop off the stage, feet slapping hard against the floor, and make for the janitor’s supply closet near the side wing behind the curtain.
As I round the corner, something catches my eye—red in the shadows. An axe, bolted beside a fire extinguisher, half-forgotten. Blade dull but solid. I stare for a second too long. Then keep going.
By the time I get back with a box of matches, my hands are slick with sweat. My heartbeat’s in my throat.
And Winnie’s on her knees. Her other hand claws at her belly. “Something’s not right. Joe?” She doubles over and something hits the floor: it’s not her water breaking. It’s thread. A thick cord of twisted, glistening thread falls out from under her with a wet slap.
Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out. Then she screams silently as her stomach convulses, pulling inward, her whole frame collapsing in on itself—a puppet with its strings cut. Then something pushes out.
It’s born. Felt saturated in her blood. Seams torn and patched again, the red thread still fresh and glistening. Limbs twitching like a spider learning how to walk. Its mouth is sewn shut—at first. Its chest heaves. Its eyes aren’t buttons.
They’re mine. My green, the green on Winnie’s nails still. Too sentient. Too alive. And then it
wails.
Not a baby’s cry. My voice. Raw, cracking. A sound I didn’t know I could ever make.
They’re still connected by five strings, red and wet, veins made from yarn—each of them tethered
to one of the thing’s limbs.
Winnie slumps back. Her arms flop to her sides, knees splayed, head lolling as the puppet moves. It sits up, and as it lifts its arm, her arm slowly lifts too. This time, Winnie’s the puppet being controlled.
“Stop,” I whisper.
It creeps near, inch by inch—each pull of string dragging her body behind it. It drags her across the stained carpet, slow and certain. Her blood smears the carpet.
I feel it then. In my spine—a pull. A twitch in the back of my neck. My shoulders tip forward.
One knee gives a little in a bow.
I straighten fast, breathing hard.
The puppet watches, and asks with wounded curiosity: “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
It’s not her baby. But it’s still hers. And that terrifies me more than anything else—because it’s mine too. Not from biology, from blood. But from the script. From the stage. From every line I fed the thing with my own goddamn voice.
It is my fault and my future—the one I wanted—sutured into Winnie.
I run. My boots slam against the tile. I rip the axe from the wall beside the extinguisher. The handle is sticky with dust. Heavier than I expect. Doesn’t matter.
I sprint back to the stage—and stop cold.
They’re circled around Winnie. Their limbs hang limp, their heads bowed and button eyes glinting.
Winnie spasms each time the baby’s threads gives a tiny shudder. Her fingers twitch. Her leg kicks as if a nerve is misfiring. Her braid is soaked with blood and her eyes are peeled open like skinless grapes.
The baby turns to me. Its darned mouth curls wide, too wide. It smiles.
And then the crying—not just from the baby. From the others. Delicate at first. Then louder.
Layers of wet felt wails, catching in tiny throats that shouldn’t exist—grief being puppeted in thin-lipped, needle-pulled sobs.
And it’s all me. They all have my voice.
The baby lurches forward, jerking Winnie again. I don’t give it the chance to take another. I swing.
The axe cleaves through thread and wool and stuffing. The cords snap from Winnie—wetly, one after the other. Another swing, and the puppet-baby flies back across the stage and hits the scrim with a dull, meaty thud.
Her body jolts. But she doesn’t make a sound. I move fast. Matches. Fire.
The puppets don’t even flinch, let alone run. The one that fell out of her crawls forward again, one limb at a time, cords trailing. It looks up.
As one, they bow. I feel it again—a pull in my spine and a thread catching under my ribs that makes me bow back in full, this time.
No.
I strike the match and throw it. They burn too fast, too willing. As if this is the finale, the only conceivable ending to our performance.
My own face, grinning as the mouth melts, burns last
The rest of the stage catches fire, but I won’t stop it. I turn.
Winnie’s still on the floor. Her lashes twitch. I gather her up—she’s all loose joints, heat and blood, her weight unfamiliar but real. Boneless. Alive. I think.
I haul her against my chest, stagger to my feet, stumble toward the aisle. Smoke bites at my throat, stealing my voice. My hands won’t stop shaking. I kick the door once. Twice. On the third try, it gives with a groan.
We burst into the cold night. The silence that follows us is too quiet. Not peaceful but perfect, the theatre waiting for the next cue.
Behind the reach of firelight, just audible with the door shutting on the flames and the curses turning to smoke, is a broken sound. Gossamer and whispered, rises the sound of my faint crying from beyond the scrim.