Page 85 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

shudders of euphoric terror that only increased as the day and then the hour itself

drew ever closer. The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play
can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before
punishment is due. A date has been selected, and on that day there will be a great
culling . . .

—

WE FILED into the school theater chattering with nerves. The volume increased

when we were handed pens at the entrance and informed that choices made in
pencil would not be accepted. When we sat down nobody removed their coats or
bags; everybody was ready to evacuate immediately. Poor Radha and Gustav . . .
their performance was merely something to sit through as we got ready for our
shocks or our pieces of cheese.

Gustav’s puppet troupe was already onstage, seated on chairs with their backs
to us. Brunhild the shipbuilder was tallest of them, and I could see the top of her
head. There was a strangeness in the way that head was positioned: I accept that
this is an almost meaningless thing to say about the posture of a puppet, which is
intrinsically all sorts of strange. But still. I began to mention this to Radha, but
Tyche and Rowan sat down beside us and I thought better of it. Tyche asked
Radha which card she’d got: shock or piece of cheese? Radha smiled very

sweetly and said, “Wait and see,” and Gustav walked onstage to the sound of
TLC’s “No Scrubs.” As he did the puppets’ chairs turned, and after that
everything compressed into a split second; we saw that every single one of the
puppets’ throats had been slashed wide open so that they erupted strings; they’d
been hacked at so savagely that even those internal strings were cut. And when
Gustav saw them he lost consciousness. He didn’t collapse, exactly—it was

more as if he’d been dropped from a height. He fell plank straight, and without
making a sound, and that fall of his was just as unreal to us as the glazed eyes
with which the puppets onstage surveyed their own innards. Their expressions
were the kind that couldn’t be altered unless physically dismantled, each smile,
scowl, or beseeching look disappearing piece by piece. Laughter was the first
response, perhaps the only natural response to such excess. It felt intended that
we laugh. Puppets and puppeteer slain by an unknown hand; for about thirty

seconds the scene was so complete that no one dared intrude upon it. Then
Gustav’s friends began to call out to him, reminding him that they’d always
known he was too serious for comedy, demanding the next scene, telling him
that it was time to get up, that they needed to know if he was OK. From where