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When Ian had proposed, he’d been wearing his vintage Nirvana In Utero T-shirt with a hole in the collar that had cost him four hundred dollars.
The Velveteen Rabbit confused masochism with love, it wallowed in loneliness, and what kind of awful thing was a Skin Horse, anyway?
Her mom remembered everyone’s birthday, everyone’s anniversary, everyone’s first day at a new job, everyone’s due date. She remembered every single cousin or nephew or church person’s entire life calendar like it was her job. She wrote notes, she dropped off pies, and Louise couldn’t remember a single birthday when she hadn’t picked up the phone and heard her mom singing the happy birthday song on the other end. That was all over now. The cards on every occasion, the phone calls on every birthday, the Christmas newsletter going out to however many hundreds of people—none of it would ever
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It felt wrong. The boarded-up hatch, the busted vent, the hammer, the cane, the TV. Her mom’s purse on the end of the counter. Something had happened right before her mom and dad had left their house for the last time. Something bad.
Whenever Louise got anxious, her dad always said, You know, Louise, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times. Not this time, she thought. This time, nothing’s ever going to be okay again.
“This is my house,” Aunt Honey said, “and I don’t want anyone calling anyone else an ‘a-hole’ when what they mean to say is ‘asshole.’ That includes you, Gail. Say what you mean, or get out.”
Women talked about their mother’s cooking in the quiet, tragic whispers they reserved for somebody dying of cancer.
That took Louise by surprise. She didn’t think of her family as weird. People thought her family was weird? “I don’t think we’re weirder than any other family,” she said. “Trust me,” Constance said. “You guys definitely are.”
“A puppeteer has passed, dear woman,” a literal clown in oversize shoes and a rainbow wig said as he slapped past them. “The puppets gather hither to bid her bon voyage.” “See?” Mercy said. “It sounds nice.” “If any of them tries to hug me I’m going to get my gun and shoot them dead,” Aunt Honey growled.
She had wanted some time after the funeral to adjust to her parents being gone before dealing with all this money stuff, but she was a mom. Nothing happened on her schedule.
“I’ll come right out and say it,” Mercy told them. “Strange noises, bad vibes, your mom and dad recently passed— Your house is haunted and I’m not selling it until you deal with that.”
Twenty years of killing, eight thousand people dead, and then—and I know we’re not supposed to count them because they’re the wrong color and from the wrong country—but a million people died over there. A million yous, a million mes, a million dads, a million moms. And for what?
Puppet work and mask work are essentially the same, and it’s hard to describe what it’s like to wear a mask to people who’ve never done it, but the second you put on a mask you’re not you anymore. Same with puppets. Put one on and your posture changes, your voice alters, and you can feel what it wants, you can feel what it’s scared of, you know what it needs. You don’t wear the puppet. The puppet wears you.
puppet is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take control,” Clark said. “Puppets have no freedom, but they give the puppeteer freedom. They have no life, but they live forever.”
“A puppet is a possession that possesses the possessor.” And a mask turns a person into a puppet.
In that moment Louise thought of The Velveteen Rabbit and she knew why she had always hated it. Being loved didn’t mean you were alive. People loved lots of inanimate things: stuffed animals, cars, puppets. Being alive meant something else. “Because you’re real, Pupkin,” Louise said. “And nothing real can last forever. That’s how you know you’re real. Because one day you die.”
