Page 65 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

the other chapters; somehow it had seeped out. And I told my glove puppet that

it was not to say the final words of the book.
The ghost approved, but she was also quite sure that you wouldn’t choose me
if my glove puppet didn’t say the words we’d planned it would say, you and I.
The ghost even advised me not to bother turning up. Naturally I disregarded her
advice. A couple of days later, the waiting room of your grand old school
encased me in marbled fog as I watched other hopefuls practicing with their
puppets. Some were more actors than puppeteers, but others handled their

marottes and tickle puppets and Bunraku puppets with an ease and affection that
didn’t exist between my glove puppet and me. I think the soul must be heavy and
smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets,
which lack souls. The girl beside me was very pretty—tousled dreadlocks,
dimples, and night-sky skin—you know, with this radiance blended into the

darkness. But I considered myself taken, and so I merely asked where her puppet
was. “It’s this.” She took a small box out of her jacket pocket, and out of that
box she took a porcelain chess piece. A plum-colored queen, her only features
her crown and a slight wave that conceded the existence of hips and a bosom.
“Did you make her yourself?”
“No, I found her. I know she doesn’t look like a puppet, but she is one. I
know it because when I first picked her up I said something I’d never said

before. I put her down and then when I picked her up I said the thing again
without meaning to, and again it was something I hadn’t said before, even
though the words were the same.”
“What’s her routine?”
“At the moment she only asks this one question, but I’m hoping to learn how
to get her to ask another.”

“What’s her question?”
The girl looked uncomfortable. She pointed at her nametag: “This is me, by
the way.” Tyche Shaw. My own nametag was lost in my hair, so I shook hands
with her and said: “Radha Chaudhry. What’s your puppet’s question?”
Tyche mumbled something, too low for me to hear. I’d just decided not to ask
again—maybe she was saving it up for the audition—when she repeated herself:
“Is your blood as red as this.”

A chess piece asking a personal question, possibly one of the most personal
questions that could be asked. I didn’t know how to answer. At my instruction
my glove puppet shook its head, No, surely your blood is redder. Tyche turned
the purple queen around on her palm and asked the question again; this time the