When the Lights Go Down in the City...

Clickity clack. The marionette’s wooden feet tap across the stage. Clickity clack. Her master glides across his perch high above. She’s heard them speak of the city lights, but with her own eyes she’s never seen. Her master, though, he can see them. He takes them in every night. Moonrise to moonset, he watches as they glitter and glow. A car zips down some distant street, its tail lamps, like a child’s sparkler, lingering for a moment in their illuminating state. He can see, but she only dreams. She’s heard them rant and she’s heard them rave, and tonight it has all become too much. So when all of the theater-goers have left and the master has locked the door and gone to bed, the puppet leaves her post between the policeman and the baker and slips into the darkness. She can barely see her wooden fingers as they reach into the black unknown in search of something that will tell her which way to go. She feels to her left and to her right but to no avail. Across the room she traipses like a silent ballerina until she comes across a shadow. Her hand reaches for it and is gleefully surprised by its find. A ladder! It is the one that she has seen the master climb night after night and day after day. She knows where it leads. A deep breathe in and her lanky limbs are wrapped around the lowest rung, a plank of wooden hope. Push and push and she’s up again, clinging to the next step. Up, up, up she goes, with every board the shimmering wonder above growing closer. Then finally she sees it, the top rung. The light she has longed for for so long is nearly in her grasp! With a great revelry rising up inside of her, the puppet takes that long awaited stride.  She stretches and stretches and pulls and pulls but something is holding her back. Craning her neck, the puppet sees that her strings are tangled around the bottom step. With one final tug she lurches towards her dream but she can’t release herself from the trap. Down, down, down she tumbles. Down from hope, down from that magnificent glimmer. Crash, she hits the floor. And there she will lie, a broken marionette, until the master finds her in the morning. No light will she ever see. No city will she ever adore. No speeding cars, no street lights, no lovers dancing on the corner. Not for her. She will forever be a puppet.