Marrionetta was fashioned out of Finnish pine. It had been a frosty spring in their small village when her maker set about her final touches. The village was known regionally for making soap and growing apples but Marrionetta’s maker was a rather gifted craftsman who might have accomplished great works if things had gone differently. Then again, while Marrionetta may be our only living proof of the maker’s talents, that’s not to say there weren’t other toys this maker created that went on to do interesting things in other parts of the world. Those toys may simply be unknown to us.
It really is a shame that it was so chilly that spring when Marrionetta came to completion, as none of the villagers made it to summer. Their town was abruptly overtaken and massacred by wandering Visigoths. The Visigoths had become lost and so followed their noses up a riverway to the small, Finnish village known for its soaps and apples. The Visigoths murdered everyone, raped their way into the larders, ate every withered, leftover apple in sight and then shoved off to another town that was known for a distinctive regional cheese. The apple variant is still grown throughout Finland today but the curious cheese recipe has been lost to time.
Marrionetta was meant as a gift for a little girl named Lempi. Lempi probably gave Marrionetta a different name but, like the cheese, that too is lost to time. Marrionetta was spared by the Visigoths who did not recognize her as an equal worthy of destruction. After the raid, Marrionetta sat for many days in a sad heap, tangled in her strings, wondering why Lempi would not get up to play or at least to help her out of the netted prison of fishing line.
After an interlude of voided time, Marrionetta began to chew herself free. To do this she had to destroy every last strand holding her back. Her small, wooden teeth were hardly the tool for the job. It took a small eternity.
She chewed and chewed with all her slight might, blubbering nonsensical emotions as she did not possess any words at the time. When she finally did sever the final string, she laid out in her freedom for many hours, exhausted and afraid her jaw might fall off if she moved at all.
Nearly a month after the death of everyone around her, she tottered off into the woods. She tried a few times to return to Lempi and the village but could never retrace her steps. Soon it dawned on her that she had been swallowed up by the world. The ensuing years unfolded, meaningless and disorienting. People and places moved around her as reflections in curved glass. Impermanence itself was her foremost and constant companion. The people she encountered fell neatly into her three primitive categories: There were Makers, there were Dead Lempis and there were Visigoths. The paradigm served her well on the long road to Drutherstone’s circus.
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