Jill Williams

The Marionette Mauler

My workshop smelled of cedar and epoxy resin. I considered inhaling deeper until I was windmilling across the clouds, but my self-medicating attempt was interrupted by a knock on the door. It was my good friend Miller. I tossed him a beer and led him inside. He stared at the legal summons on my workbench.

“What’s with the legal paperwork?” he asked.

“Puppet trauma,” I muttered.

Miller laughed. “What, do you have to ‘point where the man touched you’ on the doll?”

“No,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “The guy who bought my last piece—a professional puppeteer—is suing me. He says the puppet is ‘acting out.’ He’s claiming I traumatized the thing while I was building it.”

Miller grew quiet, searching my eyes for stolen goods. “Well, did you?” he whispered.

“Did I what!?” I didn’t like his accusatory tone.

“Did you touch him without his permission?”

I spoke slowly through gritted teeth. “He’s made of wood! I carved every part of him. He’s an inanimate object! Of course I didn’t ask for consent because he isn’t human. He can’t talk.”

Miller reeled backward like he’d been smashed in the gut with a cinderblock. When he caught his breath, he shook his head in disgust. “Wow. He couldn’t talk, so you never asked for consent. You are a monster! A monster! Keep the beer—God only knows where those lips of yours have been.”

It wasn’t even two days later when a rent-a-mob showed up outside my shop with placards and slogans. They were mostly LARPers and cosplay kids spruced up like life-sized puppets: heavily drawn nasolabial folds, pasty white makeup, red circles of rouge, and valentine lips. They swung latex axes and magical swords, shrieking that puppets had feelings, too. A cloaked wizard led the rhythmic chant: “Hey Bob, what do you say? How many puppets did you hurt today?”

I lifted a tiny corner of my curtain and peered at them. They were pureed into a frenzy, a crazed darkness ripping their souls right out of their eyeballs. I clutched my cedar-shaving chisel like a weapon in case the demonstration grew violent and they wanted their pound of puppet-flesh. My heart sank. Miller, my best friend since grade school, was out there, too, holding a placard that simply said: “I Knew His Lips Were Dirty.”

For the next twelve hours, I didn’t move from my perch by the window, nor did the protesters vacate my property. They multiplied. I coughed repeatedly, an attempt to rid myself of the jagged wood splinters clawing at my throat. I was just a regular Joe earning an honest living, and now I was being accused of being some kind of puppet-trafficking pervert. Believe me, if I were a pervert, my victim of choice would never be a marionette.

Weeks later, I was hauled before a district court judge and realized I was toast. The Honorable Kevin Brooks looked suspiciously like a grown version of Disney’s Pinocchio. And the guy who was my public defender, Tyler, kept popping cannabis gummies into his mouth like they were Werther’s Originals. He wore a white, pit-stained shirt, unpressed khakis, and white Vans. That first-year public defender smelled like stale B.O. and Takis Zombie Nitro chips.

The Judge peeked over his spectacles. His nose was a long, sharp elephant’s trunk that twitched every time the prosecution spoke.

“Mr. Arthur,” the Judge barked, “we are here to address the grievous emotional and structural damage inflicted upon the plaintiff, Cletus, and his guardian, Mr. Gary Simpson.”

I wanted to hurl looking at Cletus. His shoulders shuddered and he wailed like a toddler whose binky got stolen. “I feel so dirty!”

Several jurors sneered and shot daggers at me. One elderly woman dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and wept softly. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, “Gary has his hand up Cletus’s butt! He’s the one making him speak! And can’t you brain-dead people see his lips vibrating whenever Cletus talks?” I felt like I was in the middle of an alternate universe. Cletus, a hand-carved wooden puppet, was actually sworn in, his teeny hand trembling on a black Bible, vowing with his screechy little voice to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

The Judge’s nose lengthened a few inches as he leaned toward the witness stand. “Proceed, Cletus,” Judge Brooks whispered, his voice full of a creepy, paternal warmth. “This is a safe space. The monster can’t touch you here.”

Gary Simpson, the “guardian,” sniffled loudly. His lips weren’t just moving; he was practically over-enunciating, yet the jury watched Cletus’s painted mouth like it was the Oracle of Delphi.

“He… he used coarse-grit sandpaper on my inner thighs,” Cletus wailed. The puppet’s head did a 360-degree, mournful Linda Blair swivel toward the jury box. “He said I was ‘too rough around the edges.’ He wanted me smooth for his own sicko satisfaction!”

The elderly woman in the front row let out a strangled cry and nearly fainted. The other jurors resembled a row of heavily used thrift store toys—smudged, cracked, and leaking the scent of mothballs and cedar-chest rot.  I nudged Tyler; we were losing this case fast. But he was useless, trying to peel the wrapper off a CBD gummy with his teeth, his eyes glazing over like yellow, crusty road-rash wounds.

I looked back at the stand. Cletus was pointing a shaky wooden finger at me.

“And then,” the puppet shrieked, “he tried to force me into those satin britches! I told him they were too tight, that I couldn’t breathe, but he just kept pulling! Pulling! Pulling!” Cletus tugged at his teeny weighted anxiety vest and melted into a pile of screams.

A teary-eyed Judge Brooks ordered the bailiff to take Cletus out of the room. The puppet raised a minuscule middle wooden finger in my direction as he was carried out on a white, doll-sized cot.

The trial transformed my life into a dumpster fire of wood chips and bad press. I was no longer a craftsman; I was “The Marionette Mauler.” Every morning, I had to push through a throng of protesters screaming for my head, while the 24-hour news cycle analyzed my history of using 80-grit sandpaper on defenseless pine.

But then Tyler, my gummy-chomping public defender, actually found the evidence we needed to prove my innocence.

The courtroom went dead silent while the “Pandamonium” video played on the 70-inch monitors. The camera zoomed in on his bare, shiny pine bottom, his satin britches drooping around his ankles, gyrating against a plush purple panda while screeching in that high-pitched voice, “It’s pandemonium time, bitches.” I had forgotten to carve a dick for the little guy, so the panda’s dull black eyes just stared straight ahead, likely composing a shopping list in her mind. Then came the photos—Cletus sprawled nude in a porcelain bathtub, squeezed thigh to thigh with a bevy of barely clad Barbies and a very confused G.I. Joe doll.

“Look at the defendant!” Gary Simpson shrieked, pointing at me while Cletus “sobbed” into a doll-sized tissue. “He drove Cletus to this! The puppet was self-medicating his trauma with plushies and plastic! He was trying to fill the hole Robert Arthur carved in his heart!”

The jury foreman, a rotund man with a Care Bear tattoo emblazoned across his bicep, stood up before the Judge could even call for the verdict.

“We have reached a decision,” the foreman announced.

Judge Brooks—whose nose was now so long it was resting on the court reporter’s shoulder—nodded gravely. “And?”

“We find the defendant, Robert ‘The Marionette Mauler’ Arthur, not guilty of the trafficking charges.”

The courtroom gasped. Miller, sitting in the front row, dropped his “I Believe the Wood” sign in shock.

“However,” the foreman continued, “we find him guilty of ‘Negligent Creation.’ For bringing a being into this world with such clear, vile tendencies and then failing to provide him with a mandatory 12-step program for wood-based deviancy.”

Judge Brooks banged his gavel. “Robert Arthur, you are free to go. But Cletus is to be remanded to a state-run rehabilitation center. And you,” he pointed his long, wooden nose at me, “are banned from ever touching a piece of cedar again.”

Tyler leaned over, his breath smelling like Doritos and a million bong hits. “See, man? The panda video totally shifted the vibe. You’re a free man. Well, a free man who can’t ever buy a 2×4 at Home Depot again. Want a gummy?”

I looked at Gary Simpson. He was packing Cletus into a velvet-lined crate. The puppet caught my eye one last time. He didn’t flip me the bird. He just stared with those hand-blown glass eyes—the eyes I had given him—and for a second, I realized that humanity’s shared brokenness wasn’t just our greatest strength. It was the only thing keeping the puppets from winning.