Marionette

Marionette fell off her strings long ago.
She is glad to be away from the show.
No more gawkers or lechery, not for
Marionette. Her legs grow soft and poor

I sit in a shed, in the corner. Maybe one day someone will pick me back up. For now, dust collects in the cracks of my peeling varnish, the peeling facade. Toys are none so immortal as anyone else. Though I was never a toy, I was... an object of amusement. Maybe an objet d'art. I don't know. Women wanted to look like me; I could see the faintly jealous way they peered into my glassy eyes and wished for a moment they too could excite as much attention and admiration without seeming to be in control of any of it, but secretly powering the whole panorama. A lack of control, maybe, because without an operator I never would have worked that way. But without me, the operator could never work in that exact way. He cannot rouse the crowd with a magician, an aged crone, an intricately crafted chick on wires no thicker than an arachnid's detretius. He needed me, maybe more than I him.

That was my world. Now mildew and dank is my world. Spiders weave their lives in one hollowed orbit and see what I cannot, possibility of growing old. And there are always more to take their place. My dress is sprinkled with plaster and debris where once rhinestone fell, and my shoes erode under the weight of years. But I will continue to lie like this, seated and disjointed, until I gradually wear away after a thousand, a hundred years. Always in the same form, just whittled at by time, always the same structure underneath but just a little is scraped from this corner by a year's hand. This existence appears melancholy. No, for I know of worse. It is rest. It is knowing I, too, shall have my end. It is knowing that even my operator could not control the crowd, even with me. Our duo had to end with the advent of speed, and easier, more amusing entertainment. I was not valuable enough for a museum. He was not valuable enough for anything. He lives a few metres away, with his wife, both of them decaying and eroding, not dryly and cleanly as I do but slowly melting into a bubbling heap of senility. He would never want to put on another show; after the zenith, there is no gradual decline but a sharp fall into a void. Inhabiting a void is not possible; you must become nothing to live in nothing. He is nothing. He does not exist. He melted long ago, and she did. His pretty young bride is yellowing with age, her gums withdraw back into her head, her blue eyes are peppered with purple veins. And love wore away too.