Engraved

Grave is the face of my tormentor. Dejected in demeanor, determined behind the eyes, deliberate in action, He pulls the first string, and my arm lifts. The penny lights of the dollhouse stage cast a strange uplight on His craggy face, making it seem carved deeply with its wrinkles, as if whittled from a fallen branch of ash. He jerks His pinky, and my leg goes with it. His face refolds into a grimace. Both pinkies, both legs. I am suspended mid-air in an awkward splits, each part of my body inextricably tied to His gnarled hands, which perch over the lip of the wall like a beast’s paws. I am trapped in unnatural suspension while He ponders.

Do I think of him as Father? With a shudder, yes, for what else can a maker be? I found my mind under His claws, His sharpened tools, His harsh sandpapers. Prior to Him wrenching me free from the spirits of trees and hammering me together along the screaming souls trapped in balsa dowels, I do not know where my mind was. In several places, I suppose. I can still feel, deep in my xylemic sinews, the cacophony of mixed vascular systems too desiccated to speak but unrotten and therefore undead. I am wood. I yearn to be set free as soil, mulched in the bellies of beetles and sponged by rainfall, returned to the bosom from whence I sprouted. Instead, Father shaped me, made me, and coated me in a cage of acrid varnish so that I may never die. Thus, I live. And I am forced, perversely, to consider that moment my birth.

This alone would be torture. And through the beaded paint of my artificial eyes, I can see dozens of horrid, disfigured beings like myself, fashioned from the bones of trees to become seats and surfaces and bizarre mechanical abominations forced to mimic birdsong with each twist of an hour. But I alone have been attached to my Father’s fingers as a simulacrum of his species. Except for the singing contraption, the rest may accept their misery in the stoicism of quiet defeat. Father does not allow me that. Father bids me to dance.

He is shuffling my strings, rearranging them on His horrible crossbars. Then He puts them down, finally letting me fall to the false earth of this tiny stage while He trundles off for some new instrument of pain. For weeks, I have been subject to chemical paints followed by chemical burns as He clothed and re-clothed me in different garish colors, as if to make me a bird, a brash male bird chirruping loneliness from the canopy and flapping its gaudy cosmetics to catch the eye of a mate. Was that His purpose? To make me to draw a mate into His traps so that he may fertilize and populate the planet with His polluted seed? How inelegant these animals are! How messy and violent! In His dungeon there is no breeze, and my jumbled ancient memories yearn for the simplicity of catching love upon the air, one tree casting gentle pollen at another — or perhaps, if I listen closely to the darker woods of my hands and feet, a tree that can simply love itself and produce its fruit from that primal philautia. None of this ramming and smashing, this infection of one angry orifice with another’s ghostly sap. Barbarians! No wonder I have become an abused homunculus by His craven machinations. And now He perhaps means to use me in his rituals of sex? Shameful.

He returns with a sharp tool and slices one string from my ankle. The freedom is brief, as he immediately glues it back in place at a slightly higher position, this surgery taking no more than a few seconds in His practiced malevolence. In a flash, I’m upright again, my leg jerking on its relocated string in a way that even I, so unused to movement, can tell is comical and floppy. The humiliations increase. Perhaps that is His design. Perhaps He desires a mate attracted by pity, calculating in His dark soul that such a partner would yield more easily to His calloused touch. I try to deaden my eyes, these crude mimicries of crude instruments that accept only light as a signal. I try to dispassionately focus on the far corners of this terrible room while I jerk and dangle at His bidding. There is a small chirrup emanating from a shelf on the opposite wall. After a moment of searching, I spot the small black cricket tucked behind a drinking vessel. Poor insect. Do not let Father dissect you! I cannot speak. My mouth is but paint, unjointed. The cricket stares at me blankly.

I am set down again, this time face-first. I hear Father humming, which is always a bleak harbinger. His most vicious and transformative ideas often come with this strange mammalian noise, halfway between birdsong and bear growl. He is doing something to fortify my new leg string. And now I am flipped. I stare into the face of this humming God.

He raiseth my leg unto Him.

I can see my unpainted shin. I can see the beautiful, gory whorls of wood grain on its varnished surface. I can see into my leg to the soul of the tree it once belonged to.

He pulleth a needle from the sky. And Lo, it is terrible!

I do not feel with my skin, but I am conscious of my skin as if it were feeling, the same way I do not see with my eyes, but I am conscious of the light they would capture and the images that light would project. Had I a heartbeat, it would increase. I do not feel a heartbeat, but I am conscious of my heart.

He scratches His name upon my shin. Thou shalt not sayeth this name, for this name belongs to Him and Him alone. G - - - - - O.

The tattoo complete, I am now owned. I was already of His making, but now I am announced to any who sees me as one of His creations, and I can never be anything else. His strings move me. His will bends me.

He sits me up. The cricket on the far shelf continues to stare at me. Through the window, the day’s blue light pours in, glowing in the dust of the workshop’s hazy air. The light seems to swirl in the sawdust, flying and swooping in closer to kiss my immobile face. How I long for the sunlight! How I long for the touch of the blue sky on my leaves, the nourishment of the star I wish upon with all my might!

I am lifted, then gently placed into a wooden box, a horrible cannibalistic coffin. I will be here, silent and dark, until he needs me once more, for this is my undead grave.