Page 66 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

note of challenge left her voice and the question became droll; the next time the

chess piece asked her question she sounded worried, seeking comparison for the
sake of measuring normality. Frustration came next (after all, the chess piece
wasn’t even red . . . therefore as red as what, compared to what). From what
you’d said about Gustav Grimaldi’s puppets I knew you would strongly
disapprove of the question Tyche Shaw’s puppet asked; in fact you would hate
it. But this tiny queen’s question was large; she spoke and you couldn’t think of
anything else but her question, and how to answer it. The sharpest thing I had on

me was a brooch—I could prick my finger with my brooch pin, and then we
would see.
“You’re good, Tyche,” I said, and I wasn’t the only one who walked out for
fresh air. Several other demoralized applicants followed me out and had last-
minute conversations with their puppets.

“I’m not going to be able to get this job done for you,” my own glove puppet
said to me.
“Shhh, I won’t let you pretend this is your fault,” I told it. “I’m just going to
have to find another way to show Myrna.”
—

THERE WAS A FRAMED photograph hung on the wall in front of me, and when I

said your name I saw you in the picture. Well, I saw your back, and your long,
bright ponytail fluttering. The image is black and white, and you’re running, and
you cast a number of shadows that cluster about you like a bouquet. There’s a
figure running a little ahead of you and at first that figure seems to be a shadow
too, except that it casts a backward glance that establishes an entirely separate
personality. The figure’s features are wooden, but mobile—some sort of sprite

moves within, not gently, but convulsively. A beauty that rattles you until you’re
in tears, that was my introduction to Rowan Wayland. You and the puppet—I
decided it was a puppet—were leaping through one upright rectangle into
another. An open door seen through an open door, and in the corner of that
distant room was a cupboard, fallen onto its side. There was a sign on the
cupboard door. (I tilted my head: The sign read TOYS.)
It’s a photo in which lines abruptly draw back from each other and ceilings

and floors spin off in different directions, but for all that the world that’s
pictured doesn’t seem to be ending. You were both running in place, you blurred
around the edges, the puppet hardly blurred at all, and the puppet was looking
back, not at you, but at me. It felt like the two of you were running for your