Erika had given up on being an artist. She retired as a puppeteer at the age of 27 and now focused most of her attention on writing advertisements for a company that she hated.
Last year, on the second day of summer, she fell in love with a gifted musician named Jacob. After two weeks of dating, he moved in with her. He travelled light, but he always kept with him a small cardboard box full of sentimental items that he could never let go of. In the box there were ticket stubs and old letters and mixtapes and a rag doll named Max. Jacob put the box in a safe dry place down in Erika’s basement.
The basement floor was cluttered with garbage bags and cardboard boxes full of unopened or partially used art supplies. Under the stairs there were more boxes, packed with novels and old textbooks that Erika hadn’t read in years. Behind the furnace, in the northwest corner of the basement, there was a pie-sized hole in the drywall. Behind the hole was a small city where a marionette puppet named Penelope had lived for several years, untouched and unseen by anyone. The hidden room behind the furnace was roughly as big as a pool table and Penelope had built for herself a house with walls made of Styrofoam and a roof made of transparent plastic. The windows of her house were framed with pipe cleaners and her bed was made of cotton balls and a discarded silk nightgown. At the other end of her city, she’d used green tissue paper to simulate grass and an old lamp with a broken shade to simulate sunlight. She sat on her version of a lawn chair every day and read books and pretended that her wooden skin was really outside soaking up the real sun.
Max had buttons for eyes and crazy green hair that stuck out in all directions. He climbed out of his box just minutes after being dropped off and made his way through the mess of Erika’s things. Penelope was watching him now, peering out through the hole and diligently crawled out from her space to meet him.
Max’s mouth let loose a few threads when he saw her. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen and Max had seen beauty all over the world, tagging along with Jacob as he traveled to “find himself.” Her skin was polished and smooth. Her lips were long and thin and ruby-red when she smiled. Her eyes were painted grey-blue and her ears were tiny and round like dimes. She wore a sweater vest and a bright yellow skirt.
“Hello. I’m Penelope.”
“Hey, nice to meet you, I’m Max.”
“Do you live here now?” she asked hopefully.
“I suppose I do,” answered Max, scuffing his foot along the cement floor.
Penelope spun around and Max noticed black strings attached to the back of her head and shoulders. A cross-shaped control bar dragged on the floor behind her as she walked. “Follow me,” she said.
Max followed Penelope through the wall and into her city. He loved the house she’d made for herself and he loved the park she’d put together. On the walls, Penelope had drawn lopsided skyscrapers and trees and more houses in crayon and marker. Max asked her if she’d ever seen the ocean before. She shook her head and said “I’ve only seen pictures.”
So Max raided every box in the basement until he found the necessary supplies to make an ocean for Penelope. He used clay for sand and blanketed the top with the softest fabrics he could find. He used navy blue construction paper for water and chopped up a long sheet of blue cellophane to make waves. Penelope stretched out her legs on the sand and told Max that she would cry if she could and they both smiled at the same time.
Penelope expanded the construction of her house so that Max could comfortably live with her. She taught Max how to read and gave him books like Robinson Crusoe and The Hobbit. Max taught Penelope how to dance after finding an old CD player and a Beastie Boys mixtape. He told her stories about Jacob and how they used to play together in the backyard. He talked a lot about how much he loved Paris. He’d lived there with Jacob for three years and it was the happiest time of their lives.
Penelope and Max held hands and sat together on the beach. She turned off the sun and they looked up at white Christmas lights taped to a sky-coloured bed sheet. Max wondered out loud where the stars came from and Penelope twirled one of her strings around her finger. She explained the Bible to Max and the idea of heaven and hell. She knew that Max didn’t really understand what she was talking about so she asked him:
“What is your heaven?”
He shrugged his plush shoulders. “I dunno. I don’t think I’ve been there yet. What’s yours?”
Penelope closed her eyes and thought of Erika. “Playing with Erika,” she said tenderly. “Making people happy…taking a bow at the end of the night. They loved us…”
“I hope we don’t die like the humans do,” he said.
“How could we?” asked Penelope.
Jacob and Erika saw each other every day for almost two months. They watched bad movies together and did bad impressions of each other. They went to the market together and made dinner together. They washed dishes together and left notes for each other that said things like “See you tonight! I miss you already.”
Erika loved Jacob’s nose and chin and once told him that he was the sexiest man she’d ever known. Jacob loved Erika for everything she exposed him to. She inspired him to be more creative and he started writing new music again for the first time in months. Erika used to have a speech problem when she was a child that still crept up every now and then with certain words. Jacob loved the way it sounded when she said the word “Hold.”
It was a muggy August night when they kissed for the last time without knowing it.
The last kiss happened right before they got in a cab to go to their friends’ house for a barbecue. Erika spent most of the evening talking to a man named Chris—an ex-boyfriend who’d just got back into town after living in Australia for five years. As they drove home from the party, Jacob drunkenly told Erika that she should leave him if she wanted to. She rolled her eyes and shook her head and called him a whiny baby. The miserable conversation stretched on for most of the car ride home, then stopped abruptly until they sat together on the couch in their living room.
“…BECAUSE I DON’T TRUST YOU!”
Max woke up worried and gently lifted Penelope’s heavy arm from his chest. He ran out of the city and hopped up the stairs to eavesdrop on the fight. After three hours of listening to scattered bickering, Max ran home and clicked on the lamp and made Penelope’s eyes open.
“What’s wrong?”
“They’re breaking up,” he said bluntly. “It’s over.”
Penelope sighed. “I saw it coming,” she said, now standing up and walking over to the garden behind her house. “I don’t think Erika will ever settle down with anyone but it’s just the way humans are,” she explained.
Max scratched his head. “But it’s so nice to just have one best friend and sleep next to them every night…”
“I know, but…people are complicated.”
“You don’t seem very upset.”
“Why would I be? We’ve talked about this before. You’re staying here with me no matter what, right?”
“I’m sorry, but…no.”
Penelope froze like a statue and listened:
“Erika said last night that she wants to start doing shows again. With you.”
Penelope laughed. “I wouldn’t count on it. She’s said that before.”
“No, she was serious. She’s already booking them. You won’t be stuck living down here for much longer.”
Penelope’s face lit up again the same way it did when Max saw her smile for the first time. “But I like living down here. You should hide in the city and stay with me.”
“I would love that,” he said. “But Jake said he’s going back to Paris.”
“We can make our own Paris.”
The rag doll held her hand and said: “I’ll miss you.”
Just two hours after Max hugged and kissed Penelope goodbye, Jacob came downstairs to collect him. Max left a cassette tape full of love songs in the player and that morning, before he was taken away, he wrote a letter for Penelope and left it under her pillow. The letter, written just as she had taught him, ended with:
“Thank you thank you thank you thank you…”
Corey Mombourquette is the curator and host of the Lilah Kemp Reading Series, a monthly literary event that welcomes music, sketch comedy and drama. His fiction has been published in Feathertale magazine and in the SMU Literati Anthology.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2012.
