The Builder and his Toys

Little girls manufactured to play with legless bears float some several feet above the ground. Said bears let loose the sounds of drinking for they slurped at the air in between words, the girls below always wondering when these silly-bodies'd return to the ground where they belonged. It was not easy for the tea party to continue when little bears bit off the heads of pretty little princesses.
   So instead they played with ribbons and danced about the room.
   Above the bears effortlessly maneuvering through paper clouds was an oscillating eye would flip from the mind of one to the mind of another, its pupil extending to become a translucent tendril would adjust their memories, the visions of the women they'd become, as a person might adjust a collection of building blocks, moving bottom to top, and switching a dream from one side to the other, where it could flourish in a sunless region. The goodest part of it all was when they had their joy sucked clean out of them, they then becoming lifeless husks upon the ground waiting to be reanimated with the help of a probing needle, shivering to life to run circles round each other in this ephemeral forest, the flowers made of dainty crepe, muscular men working the strings, one upon the other's shoulder and doing knee bends while manipulating trees, birds, grass, sky, to sway in rhythm to simple melodies, sometimes making shadow puppets upon the setting sun. When it showered down upon these little girls, they danced with hands outstretched, timber tigers running circles round their shins.
   A dog head propped upon a tree barked down at them, its large eyes looking back and forth, nuzzling against the shoulder of one, and yapping uncontrollably when one of the girls' nannies approached with a tray of crumpets, the thing's wheels uncertain upon the astroturf, releasing a stream of bleeps and blips as it lowered tray to the hoard of hungry girls. "I want mine with peanut butter," said one. Another one was squirming upon the ground because she wanted to go home, but she would not go home, the other side of this cavernous hall painted in pastel colors, full of thickets where the light shifts to brown and floating bears are born of miniscule eggs dropped by their mothers to then sprout as a larva suckles at one of its mother's myriad nipples for sustenance until its hair, claws, mouth have grown and it can be weaned on fruit. The girls would not go past the bears' breeding ground for fear of the greater darkness lives beyond, a place of perpetual night (the trees leafless here and the ground covered in a foot of ash conceals occasional endless holes lead to places of unimaginable things), where was a wall touched the sky. An oak door in that wall lead to a small workroom filled with mechanisms of every variety, arms hung from the ceiling, eyes, and dresses. It smelt of violets. A man in a tie with pointed ears arranged parts upon their appropriate tables, marking them as he deemed fit with names, some of them being the potential names of their owners, other names being of various beetles. His own eyes were hard and bright. His name was Jack.
   Every evening he left up a spiraling staircase in the library adjacent, up to the waking world above, stopping in for noodles at the flower shop owned and operated by Mrs. Trotsky, she being a stranger to this place much like himself would sit with him, her plump hands offering spoonfuls of fat noodles, the broth covered in puddles of grease, her table made of a dark wood you can't find round these parts. "Where I come from people understand these things," she would say. It'd been she who'd given him the recipe for the floating bear. Invariably he'd stay till after the sun's residual light had left the sky, she watching him through water-rimmed eyes, and smoking cigarette after cigarette. Before he left she always placed her hand on his wrist. "You and I understand," she'd say. Then he would rise, without having spoken a single word, making his way from her front step and past a well-groomed house through which could be seen the couple reside there bent over the jelly tank they kept in their living room, ogling at the offspring they were currently growing in there and making cooing noises. He, however, lived alone, comforted only by the collection of artificial heads he'd collected over the years, would converse with him on the wonders of transgalactic travel, then blink and occasionally shake their pig tails from side to side, or giggle. Occasionally he sang to a screen hung above his bed, melodies meant for someone warm and desperate for his touch, but instead watching the colors on the screen react to the sound of his voice.
   And every morning he returned to his office to monitor the girls in their progress, perhaps to recall any were being overly difficult, to note any altercations and break-throughs. The girls spoke almost entirely in binary when among themselves, sounds similar to morse code. Information could also be relayed from fingertip to fingertip.

Nothing that is made can be unmade. Everything that is finds a way to continue to be, even once it's been eviscerated, its parts splayed upon the table to be reconfigured into any of a number of mechanical faces. Sometimes the residue of thought lingered within a single malfunctioning synapse, the refashioned entity rubbing its pudenda against a tree, its head clicking back and back and back and back while releasing a scream sounds to be digital distortion, its bottom on the ground, its arms and legs limp things might as well be loose garments; sometimes this essential element poured upon the floor to continue as a hologram, dancing round its fashioner's feet, following him out among the other residents of this sleepy hamlet tucked within a valley to the north, neon signs blinking in the snow and the occasional automobile stuck in snowdrift, his gnarled hands reaching down to lift this escaped nymph and tuck it into his pocket with some force as he made his way to the flower shop for the evening, the windows steamed with moisture, Mrs. Trotsky waiting by the cashier as always to then usher him to the back where they could converse in private. Multi-colored rocks would pop from the pockets of our pointy-eared friend when he reached for some coins to pay for his lunch at a local butchery, or as simple drawings unravel from out his pockets to become simply squiggly lines melting in a puddle by the curb.
   He could create monsters and thinking wisps, but could not undo what he had done, and so continued to build downwards over the years so as to store them all within the earth, perhaps someday to be reawakened and housed within a musical box, chattering with the notes so as to coax melody from the jumble of chords while owner slept, a compulsive nymph finally having found her perfect occupation after an eon of purposeless dancing within a cupboard otherwise contains simply brooms. "Aha," he'd say when he found this one in particular, having walking the full distance from top to bottom, his top hat in one hand, the other free, ready to catch whatever elusive little long-lost dream might do the trick. The town's other inhabitants thought of him as sick on water, incapable of holding a conversation, always smiling, his eyes glassy, his meat heavier than most.
   He lived a modest existence, his dual ancestry apparent in his springy step for the one and thick knoblike hands for the other, having come from a land of reaching vines and things that cling, but his father from somewhere else, Jack's words sometimes twisted round to come out back end front. On weekends he could be found at a corner table in the back of Marty's, sipping a thimbleful of whiskey sour and watching the rest. Men twice the size of himself laughed and slapped each other on the back, returning to the pinball machines with an uncertain swish of the arm, or accompanied a woman home had spent her evening alone at the bar, her lip stick lost on the filters of the scented cigarettes she smoked and the rim of her glass, ordering shot after shot, her eyes filled with a boy had slipped through her arms more than a decade previous, she having been disgusted when his love didn't prove strong enough to outlive her infidelity, repeatedly remembering the night she'd spent staring into him for the last time, he himself immobile upon her bed and seeing nothing, her hands fingering his cheeks, the tears freely streaming down her face. So many men had loved her once, and now she was forced to remember them on evenings such as this, now married to the mute fiddler could see another's thoughts. (To whose arms she was going that night, his own fingers as gentle as hers had once been for he could see her suffering.)
   Jack was not the sort of person can see the inner lining of a person, though. He didn't have any gift of second sight, was clumsy around others because of this, uncertain as to their thoughts, and so always returning to the comfort of his solitude, instead the sort reaches into his pocket for a scrap of paper only to pull out a feathered millipede, its fluted snout releasing quavering notes (music being his passion, many of his creations were musicians themselves), that'd wrap itself round his pointer finger in affection, then unfurl, its many legs pulling back its downy hide to reveal a winged little person, the former flesh having become its wings, the former million legs bunched along the spine. He'd examine it up close while the little beauty posed glowing upon his palm, its body both metallic and pliant, its features painted in watercolors, the only light in this corner of the damp and noisy room, pulling his spectacles down to the tip of his nose with the other hand so as to be able to really get a good look at this thing. He'd contemplate its construction, what he'd done, what he'd done wrong, and what he was going to do, while the other patrons did their best not to look on. Occasionally he would disappear for weeks to discover other tricks of speciate transmutation.
   For out beyond the city walls everything that is was not. A person gone to there might return with an extra head, or missing one. It was said that insects found the small of the back and bore their way within there to nest upon the vertebrae.

The town itself was nice enough. It rained most of the year. Each house was doused in greenery, lights left on within revealing the various games of cards were common. Most had never left the comfort of these familiar streets, but even so there was no simplicity with them. Musical instruments could be found in every parlor, and often the tanned hide of a pesky possum, its lips pulled back in a perpetual snarl and mounted on a wooden frame, mother in rocking chair below, eyeing her children as if to unravel the secret has made them who they are. They're always eating their light and coughing up shadows, but when they're round the bonfire, telling tales of other fires had come and gone, or breaking up wood in feats of strength they're a different people altogether, laughing as they hit at each other repeatedly, claiming in all seriousness that in the coming year they'd go in search of the fount of eternal youth, whispering to their spouse that causal reasoning had already gone off to bed as the two stumbled home, and perplexed at the ground. In short, they saw up as something other than up, and down as very much sideways.
   This is how it was the day Jack first arrived, a single mechanical doll slung under his arm, a pout perpetually frozen on her face, blonde locks bouncing in rhythm with his steps, and immediately went to town hall where he purchased the right to build a small lot in the common green used as pasture by the few kept goats or the occasional cow, he considered by them a creature of the wood not much different from these and so welcome to make use of grounds set aside for the use of nonhuman things, the transaction merely a formality to appease his moral sense, that it would be only a small shed reassuring, the townspeople content that now they had a member of the elfin race among them and so were in some way immune to any mischief from the population surrounded them on all sides, this being a heavily wooded area. A billet announced that Jack the Elf was going to build a house that went deep beneath the earth where he would then create a world of marvels. Then he did, and they chuckled and pointed.
   "He comes from darkness and wants to return to darkness." This from a tattooed man name of Richardson was a magician now employed cleaning the rooms at Crocker's Motel & Eatery, most renowned for the time he'd eaten a still living moth, claiming among other things to have spent time with the elves himself, down at Marty's, the white handkerchief he wore while at Crocker's still tied round his head, though now closer to gray than white, his face turned from one to another so as to really capture their attention, some among them nervous right from the start. "Our world can't exist alongside his," Richardson said, having lost a stenographer had been sharing his bed (at the time of his visit within the forgetful forest) to the call of the elves. She'd been entranced by their music and disappeared within the crook of a tree to become elfin herself, her features having changed to become pointed when she returned some days later, her frame slight, she looking at him as if he were an unusual variety of shrubbery for the remainder of his stay there.
   The night had come to a close, and Marty was about to shut the lights. Richardson rose to his feet, swaying where he stood, but said nothing. The others were already putting on their hats. Richardson was not exactly notorious for his insight. Someone pissed himself while passed out on your couch, and so generally dismissed out of hand. Over the course of the following weeks, Richardson became involved with a barmaid with small stunted fingers, and this conversation went largely forgotten.
   Then weeks turned to months turned to years and little girls started popping out the depths of the earth, each one with another lived within, the woman she could become, perhaps a simple wish to be made of meat, to be someone's actual daughter, or a grin would wake the moment she first discovered pain, each one aching to be human.

It is perhaps wrong to call Jack an elf. Although he looked elfish, his hands were very much a gnome's hands, his eyes determined and his thoughts mathematical. He did not have the airy quality elves bring to a room, this being perhaps part of the reason why the people of the town trusted him, for humans are somewhere between gnomes and elves themselves.
   As a child he had always been poorest at elfin music-making while excelling in areas elves hold no store, like mathematics and engineering. He had been jeered at by the other little elfin boys, their ears nicked in spots from fights, throwing clods of dirt and calling him a tinker. This had only caused him to revert to his workroom where he was determined he'd conjure up a world where he would fit, a place that was neither elfish nor gnomish, was more fantastical than either, sitting cross-legged on his floor before tome upon tome, determined to master all the arts of tinkery, to show them the worth of the thing they despised. His first mechanical feat had been the development of his trademark mechanical dolls, this then leading to other wonders, within the depths below the home of these little girls all sorts of things flourished.
   (The first and foremost tier being a place full of evergreens were themselves covered in a coat of snow, the roots of these trees extending in every direction, invisible to the eye, translucent to touch, but there and quick to flick within the brain of any who entered. They would fish around in your thoughts until they found an image they could latch onto, something that could conceal the hold they had within when you departed.)
   And down and down went the various places he'd made to store all of his manufactured ideas, from antelope-humans to tethered frogs, paper maggots and sentient furniture. At the bottom of it all was a malleable fire within which he'd dip his hand to extract a bit of pulp to mold into whichever form he chose, located within a foundry the sparks of which would latch to his suit coat, whispering as they climbed the lining, forming a leg, then vanishing once again, the room all soot, emptiness, and pipes, but for this single fire was continually stoked by a dumb brute made of a particularly inflexible rock, the furnace itself deceptively small, considering as it was the starting point for every creation had been formed within this subterranean factory, sometimes added to the gears of an otherwise inert mechanism to bring it round to a waking state, sometimes sculpted into physical form, a few features painted on to become holograms or living drawings, sometimes with a little mud and other base matter so as to be physical, through such means having created the feathered millipede. The trees were in a sense a defense mechanism, guarding the work being done below. (The land of the mechanical dolls in a sense his showroom.)
   Ben being the only one to have attempted to penetrate beyond this initial realm, having stumbled when he stepped from the pool acts as a portal from one place to the next, sometimes simply a puddle in a corner, at others a mirror or frozen pond through which the traveler is pushed with the accompanying crackling sound frost makes as it moves across a window pane, he having sat up to find himself surrounded by evergreens, snow and nothing else, then that he was filled with evergreens, snow and nothing else, immediately departed carrying a glazed expression, remained in his bar stool till late that night, glancing up at every entrance and departure as if perhaps those who came and went might be he himself. "What'd you find down there Ben," Marty said, towel slung over shoulder, but Ben saw only clouds. Every decision he believed himself to have made from this point forth would seem to go awry, instead his life lead by something other than himself, caused him to turn away at inopportune moments, and follow strangers down alleyways. At night he would have the distinct impression that he's imbedded in a pulsating root fills the world of sense, that he was vanishing to become nothing but wood.
   Jack himself was raised within the limbs of trees not dissimilar to these (the trees mentioned above being a hybrid of Forgetful Forest Conifer and Invasive Creeping Vine), his mother stirring embers while she explained the wonder of cogs and levers, this being all his father had asked of her, gone most of the time, Jack's own voice cracking whenever he'd tried to speak. Then, as a youth he'd set himself up in a studio just south of the forgetful forest had been his home to create wonders for the monarchy, having been shown favor early in his career, his presentation of a dancing troupe consisting exclusively of those notorious little mechanical girls to the fair-haired prince during his annual inspection of the stalls extremely well-received, these early models gaudily decorated, their lips more fishlike than human, their cheeks bright red circles, their eyebrows angular, machinery noticeable in spots, though his mastery apparent in the fluidity of their movements and the sparkle in each eye, this inspection having then led to his first royal commission, to create a harem for said prince.
   He'd spent a full year working on those women, but couldn't get their minds right, the morning sun often breaking through his thick curtains to reveal him bent over, pulling back an eyelid to peer into the mind of a perfectly constructed woman is neither awake or asleep, living or dead, her hair mussed, her brow furrowed as if struggling through some difficult concept, her vital signs shut down, a pencil clenched between his teeth, his hair sticking out at odd angles, his spectacles smeared in grease, the cold stone floor covered in dust, she the only seeming clean thing in there. They were incapable of understanding the worldliness the prince was looking for, both innocent and too astute, always opened their mouths to breathe, seeming uncomfortable in their skin, squinting to look within and see the flaws in character of anyone with whom they might come in contact, fond of the soiled housecoats he kept so as to protect their modesty and incapable of sexual intercourse. That's to say, they were incapable of experiencing pleasure, and therefore incapable of understanding how to give pleasure to others, he being only capable of understanding joy in the gnome sense, the joy comes from within, they lighter than the world surrounding, sometimes seeming to have been pasted upon this otherwise drab scene.
   When he unveiled his creations to the prince, each one watching as this strange man marched up and down the row, each one with the same guarded expression, each left eye concealed under an identical swath of chestnut brown hair, mouths open and framed by red velvet curtains behind, the prince astonished, looking from the beauties he saw before him to the small man beside then back, reaching out to touch the moist cheek of one, then the lips of another, though when he attempted to press his finger to her moist eyeball, she blinked repeatedly and stepped back, then bowed. "Please don't damage me, sire," she said, her head cocking to one side upon completion of this sentence, dazed in the manner of a person has just woken up. The prince stood staring back for some time, thinking only the warm thoughts of protection, that in his castle he and this woman would drink coffee in the balcony mornings, and she would give him this same look then, though her hair would be tousled, her fingers unaccustomed to the tea cup she held in them. He exhaled and looked to Jack.
   "Good job, tinker elf," he said, but in the coming weeks, the sheer oddity of each and every one, each one distinct, but to his mind each one the same in her inability to be touched as living material would be touched, and to react as a live human would react to his each caress, always compliant and nothing more, he invariably leaving the room, his open robe flapping, he then throwing it over to cover himself as he sat and brooded over their implacable purity once again, or when having one in as his evening companion, a simple question answered with, "Your majesty cannot understand me, because your majesty does not understand himself," she upon the couch and naked, her eyes a blank accusation. It was on an evening such as this that he commanded all of them to be melted down immediately, leaving the odious task to his master cook, the man looking on as each fell with serenity to the fire below, perhaps looking back before she took that final step with a smirk, hair unkempt from the weeks spent away from her maker, having never been taught the purpose of a brush. Word spread quickly that Jack had displeased the prince and he could not find work.
   As he crept steadily into debt, his workroom became to him a cage, everywhere drawings of his created women, these conjuring up visions of them reclining and captured, for the prince to simply truss up and display to his friends then slaughter like cattle, their eyes always the same, uncomprehending of human cruelty yet wise in the ways of humanity. Jack would hold his fist to his face and stare darkly at the corner for several hours, then pick up his pencil to begin the tedious task of invention, only to see her before him once again, smirking as only one who has seen death can, a hard smirk, her hands become talons, her nudity gory there before him, beckoning him to the castle, another version of her round every corner, turning from the jeers of one to another arrogant and also naked upon the ballroom balcony above, looking down at his frightened little eyes in disgust, he then turning away in this waking dream only not, she on every side of him, staring back at him and very close, against him and whispering, "Why did you abandon us Jack? We loved you and you abandoned us," showing not only their bodies, but encapsulating him within, the whole of them become an egg, and he clawing at their soft and suffocating flesh, and whimpering. The voice was everywhere then. "We are tied with you. We will haunt you. You'll never love anyone but us, and your dreams will turn dark." The look he saw then was one of hate, and he was certainly awake. They had learned cruelty after all, for they'd been treated cruelly.
   Always it would be the same dream, the same blank piece of paper upon the worktable before him, and making the same blank promise never to create a thing of beauty again, leaving abruptly at sundown, stumbling on his way to the local theater, every evening enthralled by the entertainments found there, a local magician name of Soren, would reveal himself to be a different monster each and every night, pealing off his skin to reveal a gorgon lashed its tongue as it surveyed the audience on one occasion, on another pressing fingers through his own forehead to pull forth two eggs hatched in his hand to reveal two squealing infant dragons then thrown into the air where they erupted into flame, flew about the room and returned to their master's shoulders, Soren's eyes gone black and his voice baritone when he raised his arms that night and with them every piece of furniture, every person was raised into the air, tangles of hair fingering their owners face, or the surrounding smoke. "Choose your familiars," he had said then, and the dragons had flown within an unsuspecting boy and his mother who had left the auditorium that night to become wandering mendicants, the two no longer themselves and inseparable, their features shifting to become hard and wise like the dragons contained within, while only the eyes remained human. He was that boy, and that was his mother, also conjured by himself that night.
   Much like Jack he had also grown up knowing only his mother, a nervous child, taking to his bed for weeks on end sometimes. He became haughty later, but as a boy his cheeks had often been hot with tears, his own mother a courtesan disappeared before he'd grown to teenage years, he often envisioning her calling out to him from a cage of moist air while he shivered through his first winter, coughing into his balled hand, taken in by a card shark taught him the art of the con, the man's breath mealy, the two of them feasting on worms and refuse. At age fourteen he'd stolen his first book of magic, learning quickly how to slip wallets from out of pockets at a distance and vanish upon pursuit, hiding himself upon a ship one night, after his keeper had dislocated Soren's shoulder in a fit of rage, and in revenge Soren had caused the man to cut off his own face in a delusional fit. Soren had been discovered early on, but convinced the crew of his nobility, spinning tales of satin and stones, or his journey to the nether regions, and the envy had caused him to be dispelled from the palace. In one of the desert countries he was presented to the queen, and his wondrous adventure began.
   A decade later he'd returned, and on the evening in question, his mouth grown larger than his face, then smaller than a pinhole, the words issuing forth having lulled the audience into a trance, and he hopping from the stage to prance around upon the tables of his now subdued audience, he left the stage in a sweat and retired to the bar where he would drink himself to sleep as usual. Jack was there already, having slipped out of the auditorium before the seas of sleep had overtaken him, turned to Soren and said, "I have been watching you for some time. I am a tinker elf. We could teach each other." His suggestion being that the two pack their belongings immediately and catch a caravan going south to the intergalactic port. "The king's city," he said, going on to woo Soren with the possibility of passage offworld, though in truth Jack wanted to capture Soren's power and knew that here where Soren moved with fluency from card tables in back alleys to the prince's court, this would be impossible to accomplish. "We are wasting our talents here," he said, and the magician laughed, his long thin fingers clasped before him.
   It was at this point Jack pulled out a root he'd been carrying in his sleeve, flicked its end, and the thing flew away as a butterfly. "Join me for a short period, and I'll show you all my art. Then, if you still wish, you can always return," he said.

   Months turned into years, and nothing was accomplished. For all of his dexterity upon a stage, Soren couldn't quite capture the concepts by which the workman's art were performed. He'd leave abruptly, find a small gathering several miles away he simply had to attend to smoke furtively and make bizarre postulations, his elbow on the table when he noticed the one he would bed that night, she poised on the other side of the room, her eyes beckoning, he turning to excuse himself from the bearded composer had just been describing the wonders of the twelve-tone system to move directly to her dreams waiting to be captured and manipulated by his able hand, whispering her soul to life, her face gleaming contentment and pressed against his emaciated form within the hour. Jack on the other hand, in an effort to grasp the magician's craft learned less and less from the man himself, instead reading incessantly for days at all-night diners decorated in strings of tiny lights and knee-high gilded statuettes, or while sitting cross-legged upon concrete floors, his thick stained fingers twitching as he turned page after page, or twisting a tuft of hair repeatedly. They continued to slip into poverty, sleeping in abandoned warehouses, stealing water to wash by candlelight, or in the closet of a woman fancied the magician (or rather Jack would, Soren sleeping elsewhere), Jack seeming oblivious to their situation, Soren unable to forget, walking the streets and convinced that he was now greater than he'd ever been before, although he couldn't remember the last time he'd performed, now he was at his peak, seeing into the soul of each passing pedestrian.
   That they couldn't seem to part one from the other being the most remarkable part. Of course, in retrospect it was quite simple. Each one believed that if he learned to become the other while retaining himself then he would become the true master of his craft. It was Jack who disappeared one day, however.
   Having forgotten entirely about any potential departure to another planet or solar system he simply packed his single carpet bag and left the city, leaving Soren in the arms of his woman, the sheets rumpled and she stating plainly that she wanted to cage him in a pretty place to be kept forever, his eyes shining and feminine fingers wrapped round her waist, she feeding on his fanciful imagination, his pupils grown small and bright. He died there of a fever and Jack retired to this village to transform dead matter into something vibrant in a cavernous deep seemed to never end. (The ability to bend space such that up was indeed down, and down sideways being one of the tricks he'd slipped from out the magician's pocket.)

Each department housed another potential addition to the consuming world above, some fanciful such as two-dimensional unicorns, others with an infant's head instead of an anus, shitting every time the thing woke to scream feces. At night he bent over his worktable, his body forgotten and only the sheer possibility of it all apparent, perhaps let out a burst of laughter, perhaps to then reach up to snatch a grasshopper by the wings and examine it while it twitched under his fingers' pressure, struck by the softness of its touch when he released it to watch as the thing crossed the back of his other hand unperturbed. "Now I will create things that touch in this way," he'd said at this time.
   The little girls were not alone on their floor. This was where successful inventions went to be bred. The breeder was in the wall. He fed parts into the wall's sphincter and out came an elephant rock or darling doll bouncing to her feet to hurry after the rest. There was a room for little boys as well filled with wooden horses, their eyes periodically alighting with the flames of violence (opposite in kind to the flames had found their way within that mother and son turned mendicants, the fire that burned in the furnace below neither of these and both), a face gone dark to hit the other with the bottom of his fist and snicker, each one in appearance identical to the fair-haired prince had once destroyed a thing of beauty. The little boys wrangled about their room until it was nothing but scraps, silicone mothers entering with little precise steps to darn their clothes. "What good little boys," they'd say, twitch and leave the room, bits of wood clenched in hand.
   When released upon the world these children had no tangible memory of this time. They grew to believe themselves human adults like anyone else, ordered as future spouses by concerned parents who had also purchased a doll of the opposite gender and only wanted what's best for their adopted offspring, he looking forward to a day when you couldn't discern the organic humans from the manufactured ones, all records destroyed upon departure, that he may someday find himself living beside neighbors had been manufactured by his own hand being yet another thing sent him into a fit of laughter, this laughter being something Mrs. Trotsky would never see.

A pair of newlyweds were the first to adopt one of the dolls. The little girl blinked and said, "I got eyes. They show me who you are." Then pranced on out to the garden to skewer a frog. The concerned parents retired to the bedroom where they continued their conversation in bed. Nothing was resolved that night.

   Within a decade no one knew themselves anymore, the creatures that came from within Jack's well of creation having grown stranger, some invisible, haunting barstools down at Marty's (this being what caused Ben one night to jump from his own stool and announce that he's going down there himself to destroy this thing been eating them all out from within for too long), a forgetfulness having ensued after the initial delight wore off, of who they'd been, and what they'd lost. It was the two brothers changed all this, they being also his creations, lived in one of the lower levels, passing the torch of glee from hand to hand.
   When one held it, the other went silent and collapsed, his thought gone when the torch was passed back. The wallpaper in this room brittle, the apparently wooden floor covered in dust but for the path from the single chair there for the purpose of his sitting and the door through which the other immediately departed after taking up the torch to play within the expanse of colors just on the other side of this wall. He would dance from out to in and up to down, then round the other way, encountering hesitant frogs and birds had forgotten their song, walking trees, ticklish to the touch, whispers of stories, bursts of emotion, all there in a moment, then not, he in a place without place, where everything that could be was, then return once he'd taken to shaking, exhausted by so much fantasy, handing back his torch to the brother he believed to be its rightful owner just then.
   The room in which each lived when not handling the torch was directly behind the room in which the furnace fueling the fires of creation could be found, their other room full of the smoke produced by this fire, the smoke twirling internal, vanishing at a point somewhere near the center of the room, although also no particular place. There were no doors leading here, and no doors leading out. Each of the two brothers knew nothing but these two rooms, having been furnished here by Jack on a night he was suffering from fever, whispering a single sentence repeatedly throughout this night of cold sweats, "Soren and Jack will make it back. Soren and Jack will make it back," convinced that through the creation of these two he would become well again. After the fever'd passed he forgot all about this place, even how to get here, for Jack didn't simply travel through ponds. He could also travel around walls.
   The boys had no recollection of Jack, both having been fashioned by the elf-tinker completely devoid of preconception, their minds always alighting on new concepts would then flitter away as soon as the torch was gone, they then left empty yet still sentient, then when reaching out to find fingers gripped round it once again, the energy of the torch would tingle up the arm, to the spine, and finally the brain of he who wielded it, this being an ember from the fires of creation, and they then creators themselves, capable of creating because they were empty, empty because they were capable of creation. It was a physical parable he'd concocted, perhaps for his own amusement, but more than this as an experiment, to see what would become of them if left alone together indefinitely.
   What happened was, several years later, after Ben had made his attempt to infiltrate within and Richardson had left town, when passing the torch they both inadvertently grasped it, and both were empty yet still full of fantasy, both no longer themselves but a single entity saw immediately the world beyond these walls, following the smoke to the center of the adjoining room, becoming smaller as they went, till out they popped back at the beginning, surrounded in flame, their hands having been (from the moment they'd first both gripped the torch till then) melded into a single mass of veiny connective tissue, now seemed to be slipping into the arm of the other, the distance from shoulder to shoulder shortening, their two faces screaming in mirrored tandem as both were consumed in the other. Then he was no longer a doll, but a child of this place, the furnace shattering, his body steaming hot upon the floor, the thing of rock rising to its feet, only not fast enough.
   For this boy was now full of the stuff of life, moved through the room before the creature tended the fire could open its mouth, then was through the mirror at the room's far end, skipping from one pond to another, past the realm of trees, bouncing out finally upon the uppermost realm, where he hopped from cloud to tree, to bear, to doll, to sky to ground, laughing at a pitch and velocity sounded insectival. The other dolls had surrounded him while he did this, and now all stood, legs apart, arms straight by their sides, hands fists, then charged him, only for him to charge back, leaping from the shoulder of one, to the head of another, touching one on the thigh, the other on the neck. Each one he touched fell back as if singed by the heat of his touch, rolling to the ground, her shiny red shoes tucked up underneath, releasing a series of sounds, neither human nor otherwise, frilly dresses fluttering in the slight breeze caused by the two muscular men manipulated the scenery. When he saw these men approaching, floating bears swarming round on either side, he ran straight for and through them, through the nesting ground, through the darker place of ash, through the small doorway on the other side, where he came face to face with Jack himself.
   Jack stepped towards this wayward creation in his confusion, but when he did the boy lifted him up and pushed him into the sphincter in the wall. When Jack came out the other end he was grinning stupidly and covered in mucus, laying back to shut his eyes for the last time, his creations approaching in clumps to pick at his clothes, seeing faces wherever he looked in those final moments, some familiar, others with a bit of tongue on the cheek. Porcelain had been his favorite, everything built for a purpose.