PINOCHIO

Once, there was a puppet who wanted to be a real boy.The first mistake was his wish.The second was that something answered.

In the house of the Artisan, under the ever-ticking attic clock and amidst the sickly smell of pine shavings and stale varnish, the thing called Pinochio hung from a hook. Pinochio did not sleep, for it was not made to dream. But it could think—or at least, it believed it could, because the Artisan’d speak to it. It will later wish he hadn’t.

This thinking had crept in gradually, like rot through old wood. At first, the Artisan’s words were nothing but noise, incessant, never-ending. One day, Pinochio found itself… curious: the light at the window, the distant sound of laughter on the street below. Then came the questions—endless, sticky, irreconcilable questions. What am I? Why was I made? Why was I made this way?
These were not the questions of a child. These were the questions of a prisoner.
The Artisan called it love. But the love of the creator is only tenderness applied to a structure too fragile to withstand it. The puppet was carved, jointed, varnished, and assembled with care—each motion of the chisel, each brushstroke of oil and pigment, another nail hammered into the coffin of becoming. The Artisan had said: You are my son. You are a real boy. I love you.
But what is real in a world so saturated with performance?
This was the Artisan's true cruelty: he made the puppet not only capable of reflection, but capable of believing.
—
One day, the Artisan vanished. No note. No tragedy. No grand climax. Just absence, as if the Artisan had never existed at all. A cruel joke, or perhaps a final mercy.
Now the puppet sat in the workshop, motionless, gaze turned inward. A marionette without strings is not free—it is forgotten.
As the days passed, the thing once called Pinochio began to hear whisperings from the cracks in the walls, from the empty shoes by the door, from the hollow of its own chest.
“You were never a boy,” they hissed. “You are only a story that no one wants to read anymore.” “Even your maker grew bored of you.”
The puppet tried to remember why it had ever wanted to be real. Had it imagined a life? Laughter, companionship, a warm touch on the cheek? These were myths—puppet dreams—passed down like hand-me-down clothes from broken toy to broken toy. But no dream holds weight against the silence of a god who does not return.
And then the voice came.
Not the Artisan’s. It did not speak words, but implications. Realizations. Cold truths that settled like dust in the puppet’s crevices.
It said: You are not alive. You are not dead. You are a middle thing. A mistake.
You are what happens when the desire for life infects the inert.
The puppet tried to move, but the joints would not obey. It tried to cry, but the painted eyes remained dry. Only the mind remained, floating in the stagnant air like a fly trapped in syrup.
And then, as the attic clock struck midnight, a thin thread descended from the ceiling. Silken, black, and impossibly long. It brushed the puppet’s shoulder.
“Would you like to be real?” the absence asked again.
The puppet, in a moment of exquisite lucidity, understood the cost. It was not freedom. It was not personhood. It was not joy or agency or soul.
It was suffering. It was error. It was the unbearable knowledge of existence without recourse.
And yet—
It said yes.
—
It began to move.
Not with the jerky charm of a children’s tale brought to life, but with the slow, dreadful rhythm of something obliged to move—of a puppet walking not because it wanted to, but because the invisible thread demanded it.
Down from the attic it descended, one hollow footstep at a time. The house, long disused, responded with the creaks and moans of ancient things shifting in protest. Spiders scattered from corners. The clock on the wall no longer ticked.
How long has it/it been? Time was a concept humans’d made up.
It opened the door. The street was empty. The town had withered in silence, boarded windows and sagging roofs leaning like drunks against the inevitability of collapse. Where were the children who once ran laughing past the window? Where were the men who had lifted their hats and the women who smiled knowingly at the Artisan with his fatherly gait?
They had gone where all illusions go: away.
The puppet walked through the streets for what could have been hours or years— it still couldn’t quite grasp the difference. Wherever it turned, the thread followed. Sometimes taut, sometimes slack, but never gone. There were no hands above holding it. No stage, no curtain, no audience. Just the sensation of being drawn.
It tried once to resist, to fall limp like the wooden corpse it once was. But the thread twitched, and pain—not physical, but a kind of reality-ache—shivered through it. It could not disobey.
It was real, after all.
And real things must play their part.
—
Eventually, it reached a field on the edge of town. Dead sunflowers stood like skeletal witnesses, heads bowed in mockery of prayer. There, in the center of the field, lay a mirror. Not placed by human hand, but grown from the earth.
The puppet knelt and looked into it.
At first, it saw what it expected to see: a puppet, still wooden, still painted, eyes wide with the falsity of innocence.
But the mirror changed.
The reflection became not one, but many—a fractured kaleidoscope of puppet forms, each subtly different: some older, some more childlike, some mutilated, burned, or warped beyond recognition. Each stared back, unblinking, with eyes that did not seem to see, only endure.
Then the mirror showed no puppet at all. Only a hole, ringed with teeth, yawning infinitely inward. A wound in the fabric of reality. The reflection of something that had looked upon the world and decided it was a joke—and not even a clever one.
The thread tugged once more.
And in that moment, the puppet understood.
It was not alone. Not special. Not chosen.
It was one instance of a recurring failure—a discarded idea, a dropped stitch in the garment of universal error. All those reflections in the mirror were not its past lives or parallel selves. They were other Pinochios, scattered across the dreamlike architecture of failed worlds, all birthed by the same absurd impulse: to be real.
The Artisan had never loved it. There had never been an Artisan. There was only the story, repeating itself again and again like a ritual performed by no one, for no one.
And worse still—this was not even the story’s first telling.
It was merely the latest performance in a cosmic marionette theater with no exit and no audience. The horror was not that it had been made to suffer, but that the suffering was incidental—a side effect of the universe grinding its gears in blind perpetuity.
Pinochio screamed.
But wood does not scream. And no one would have listened if it did.
—
The thread lowered it back to the house. Back to the attic. Back to the hook. The performance was over. Until next time.
In the dark, it hung—now fully real, and thus fully aware. Aware of its own contingency. Aware that even this small, tragic drama was nothing. Not a parable. Not a lesson. Not even a warning.
Just another echo in the screaming silence of everything.
—
They say that when you pass the house now, you’d see something hanging. Watching. Waiting.
Waiting for its thread.
And when you walk away, you might feel something brush your shoulder. Something light. Something fine as silk. Something interested.
Because the story must go on. It always goes on. Even though it doesn’t mean anything.