Paper Boys

1.

All lunch, she sits in the grass and smiles at the flowers she meticulously ravishes. This one is a daisy - its white petals fluttering to garnish the splattering of peony bits and aster leaflets already slewn around her. He loves me. The daisy has a hungry mouth now gaping at the sky. He loves me not. A very hungry mouth. He loves me. He loves…

Mouth turns to bald spot turns to a barren stem prophesying he loves her not. She’d seen this coming from four petals ago, but it still makes her indignant. One more flower, she decides, for real this time. And so she continues, knowing the boy she cares about watching, is watching.

He had noticed her hair first. It was the kind of golden riverlet the princesses in his father’s fairytales had. The kind of hair donned by the fairest of them all, those whose beauty incite desperate kingdom-wide searches and jealous stepmothers. The boy had learned from those stories that girls like these were impossible to see without falling in love. He’d noticed her hair before he had even opened his lunch box, and now, almost finished with his sandwich, he wonders if this is love yet. Peanut butter sticks going down a wooden gullet just as it does any real boy’s. So he sits at the lunch table bench watching the girl with gold ringlets pluck flowers, and he doesn’t know why his throat is so dry.

From across the lunch area, the girl’s brother has been watching the wooden boy watching his sister. And he has no doubts about the intentions a freak like that would have. He shoulders over. BAM. His fist catches the offending boy squarely in the jaw. It hurts his knuckles more than he thinks it hurt the wooden freak.  He turns the grimace into a snarl quickly enough though.

“Keep your beedy eyes off of my sister,” he yells, landing a kick this time.

The brother’s gaggle of friends join in, stubbing their toes against Pinocchio’s carefully-carved limbs. He lets their pummels marionette his body in every which way. He twists into the mud.

They taunt from above. The kicks come from every direction. “Even humpty dumpy broke when he fell. But you…we could shave all the wood off strip by strip and when would you even die?

"This hurts us more than it hurts you, huh? Do you even feel anything?"

"I bet he goes home and doesn't even do the world right by feeling the shame he should when he sees himself"

"We can only hope he feels his dad's disappointment in him whenever he sees the monster he is"

Then he hears the girl’s voice above him. It doesn’t match the melodic, regal softness befitting of her character, but it pushes the boys away.

The bell rings and the kids run back into the schoolhouse. 

The boy isn’t wrong. It doesn’t hurt—not in the same way he imagines it must hurt real people. His knees protest as he pulls them to his sore chest, but he feels how there is no fleshy give and thinks it must be worse for real people, no? Nothing is bruising, and nothing will, though the wet grass isn’t ideal on his finish. The mud will dry badly around his joints too, but he can’t make himself get up yet. Father can repolish him later though. They're wrong that he doesn't feel shame in the mirror. He knows that feeling well, can feel it welling up now. He doesn't feel other people's feelings—he has never felt his father's disappointment. Should he? Can they?

Above him, even the clouds gravitate towards one another like they have warm arms they can belong in. He clasps his hands together around his knees. No hands would fit together with his, as smooth and unyielding as they are, but in the sky, he can see knights in shining armor and gleaming carriages carrying soul mates to their happily ever after. That one looks like a princess trapped in a tower. Pinocchio imagines climbing that hair like Rapunzel’s prince. He imagines what it would be like to be the prince. Would the wind swirl leaves around him for a magical moment of intense eye contact when he finally climbs into her tower? Wouldn’t the sunlight reflect strangely on his unmovable carved hair?

He can picture the girl with the flowers in those clouds up there. That cloud moving over there, he can see as the prince drawing closer. Can he picture himself in this story? He has never wanted to look into a girl’s eyes like that. He wants to talk to the girl with the flower though. Or does he? All the princes he’s read of fall in love instantaneously, get swept off their feet before the strike of midnight, would sacrifice their kingdom for the love they are so, so certain about. Pinocchio only knows that he thinks about the girl more than he thinks of her brother, but he doesn’t want to marry the girl, so what does this mean?

He’s so enraptured to see if cloud-prince will catch up to cloud-princess’s tower that he doesn’t hear the rustles as she comes back.

“I’m sorry about Johnny.”

She reaches a hand out. Later, he’ll think back and realize he should have reached up to take her hand, but in the moment, he’s distracted because the clouds had almost reached their fates. His eyes had been glued to the little gap left to cover, and now instead of that closure, he sees her eyes. And they are beautiful. In the moment, he’s less sure of his uncertainty. He could look into her eyes for as long as those princes do. He’s sure he could make himself really need her. After long enough for her though, she drops her hand.

And plops down in the mud next to him. The clouds don’t look the same anymore - Pinocchio can’t find the prince. “He just cares about me.”

She spares no care for her white dress as the mud eagerly encircles. He is suddenly aware of how close she is and how confused his hands are about what to do. The hem of her dress laps at his fingers, and he tries to move—it’s then he realizes just how strongly the mud wants to hold him. He manages to push viscous brown around in a wet snow-angel of sorts. It buries the hem of her dress and does nothing to free him.

She laughs and uses both her hands over his to lift his arm out. “You’re cute,” she says, her hands not leaving his. He isn’t breathing. He isn’t making eye contact with her now. Her hands are cold.

“I got you an icepack for you,” she explains, cocking her head at the bag of ice slowly adding more fuel to the muddy patches around the, “before I remembered you probably don’t need it. Sorry about that; don’t want to make your hands cold too.” She doesn’t pull away though, and he doesn’t want her to. Nobody has held his hand like this before—not his father, certainly not Jimmy Cricket. Whatever this feeling shooting up from his hand to his chest is, he could see this as love.

“You are ok though, right? Does it hurt?” 

“No, yeah, no, I’m fine.” He stumbles over his words.

She laughs again, “You are so cute.” And she closes her fingers around his then. “I like you, Pinocchio. I know people think you’re different, but I like you the way you are.” He closes his fingers slowly, experimentally, careful not to pinch her when his finger joints hinge.

He doesn’t know what to say. One second goes, and another. He doesn’t know how he’d recover from another. “I like you too." It bursts from him, and it's the truth. And then just as suddenly, she kisses him on the cheek, and the warmth in his chest freezes. He freezes.

“Do you want to kiss me?” She’s traveling closer to his lips already. He doesn’t know. It’s too fast. He nods. Her soft lips ghost over his and he’s abruptly aware he might have peanut butter in his teeth and he doesn’t know know how to kiss and the characters only kiss when they’re marrying or dying. It’s too fast, but he nods, and she’s there.

Until his nose hits hers, 2 inches longer. He frantically shakes his head, but his nose doesn’t retract so quickly to recanting a lie.

She backs away confused. “Do you not like me”

“No I do, I do, I love you.” He does, he thinks, right? Everyone love people like her.

She stares at his nose, watches it stretch again.

“You nose is growing”

“No, no it’s—” Where does a lie start? He doesn't think he's lying, but it is true his feelings don't seem as simple as the fairytale princes make love seem.

“You’re nose grows when you lie.”

“No, I—”

Do lies form in deception or lack of truth? Even these instinctual denials, he’ll realize later as it keeps him awake, are not true. In the moment, he can’t tell if his nose is still growing or not. He doesn’t know how he feels.

“You don’t like me.” She says distantly. “You’ve been watching me this whole time, thinking I’m stupid, haven’t you?” She has backed away. “You think I’m ugly and stupid.”

“No, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Like the queen— no, that sleeping princess. Everyone loves her. I love—”

It catches in his throat. He doesn’t know how he feels. He doesn’t think it’s love at first sight. Unless this confusion is love. Is this it? Maybe this is all that he is capable of. The characters in the stories all get swept off their feet before the strike of midnight. Maybe it’s a real-boy thing.

She looks at him in disgust. “You’re lying. Brother was right. I’ve been so stupid pining over a wooden puppet.”

She kicks the pile of flower stalks and petals she’d built up as she runs away. He reaches his arm out because that’s what they’d do in the stories, but he doesn’t chase after her. What would he say? Why doesn’t he love her? Why is he broken? There must be something even the cloud characters get to share with only real boys.

2.

Father isn’t home when Pinocchio finally stumbles back. Or maybe he is, in the dining room waiting with dinner, but Pinocchio doesn’t have the heart to go through the front door to be able to see him there. Instead, he sneaks through the window of the workshop in the back. The latest toy—done at least enough that his father has shown him how to wind it up and ask questions—is on the work table. It’s like the enchanted crystal ball from last year that would give fortunes. But thay one had rolled off the table and broken, so Father made it into a box this time.

It's a jack-in-the-box toy. It’s all blue stars and red borders, scraps of leftover plywood, and the lever taken from a discarded toy. Pinocchio cranks it - once, twice, three times, asks “have you ever loved anyone?”, and waits for a divine answer.

‘Pop goes the Weasel’ ends abruptly and the answer comes: “I am not enough of an I to love.”

Jack always answers cryptically like this. This must be why he’s not finished yet. Pinocchio pushes him down again and starts cranking again. “You are here though. You think, therefore you are.”

…Pop! goes the wea— “no, I think you’re wrong.”

“You’re alive aren’t you?” Pinocchio pushes.

Again, he cranks, and again the puppet comes out with its same mischievous expression. “I am not, no.”

The song is starting to get annoying, but Pinocchio sits through it for the conversation. He asks, “Are you Jack, in a box?”

“I am Jack in the Box.”

“No, but are you in the box, or is the box just you?”

“Are you in that wood, or that just you?” Pinocchio thinks it’s possible the puppet almost sounds annoyed, though nothing in the blank eyes would indicate that. It’s unsettling. He pushes the lid back.

“That’s different.” He says, “I’m one thing. You’re in a box.”

“No,” Jack pops out quicker this time. “I’m Jack in the Box.”

“Ok, so the box is you.”

“No, the box is the box. What is the problem with you?”

“Am I I enough to love someone? I know I’m real. I exist.”

“I’m sure you do exist.” Pinocchio stares at the puppet, and the puppet stares back. A long enough silence later, it adds. “I’m sure you can exist without needing to love, or even be sentient to feel like you exist.” A pause again. “I’m in this world too, aren’t I?”

They keep staring at each other until Pinocchio is sure it has nothing more to say. What a high-maintenance conversationalist. His hands are starting to get sore, but he goes again with the cranking.

“Why did they make me come alive but not let me be a real boy?”

“The blue fairy was just doing what she was told.”

“Who told her?”

“Your father wished it.”

“He should have wished better.”

“What’s the difference anyways? Wood, meat, you’re all pretty much the same at the molecules anyways.”

“But they feel something I don’t.”

“No, they just say that.”

Why won’t this toy say complete thoughts? Pinocchio angrily cranks and cranks. “What do you mean they’re just saying it? They love and they get married and they’re happy.”

“They made it up and they say they feel it. Just like you say you feel things and “are conscious” because “you think”. It’s funny how you all do that. I don’t know why you all insist on saying you’re conscious and feel. It must be some kind of evolutionary—”

“You’re wrong. Shut up.” It’s broken, Pinocchio concludes. What is it saying? He slams the lid over the puppet.

“—product. Somehow it’s evolutionarily fitting for your survival if others hear that you feel things…” The puppet pops back on it’s own. Pinocchio shoves it again. It pops right back, like the locking mechanism on the hinge is broken. “...even the birds say it,” the puppet rambles on. “But why make up such a concept? Maybe it’s a byproduct of speech production. But no, I can talk and I haven’t resorted to telling people I feel like I exist.“

Pinocchio throws it now, splintering the bottom left corner of the box and collapsing a precariously-stacked pile of bells. But nothing stops the puppet from philosophizing. “Is it something about making others understand you’re special? But they’re not conscious either, so do they think you are special and different, or does everyone just understand they’re deceiving each other?”

“Shut up.” Pinocchio throws a pillow at it, wanting to snuff the voice out.

“What’s the point?” It keeps staring ahead at the floor with its smile, under the storm of everything Pinocchio can hurl. “Just to say it has something others don’t? What’s the point?”

3.

Pinocchio calms down in his room with his crayons. He cuts out the characters he draws to hand on the clothespin line on his wall. 

“Ow,” he says instinctively for a cutout whose arm he accidentally cuts. Then snorts, because why did he react to the paper? It wouldn’t hurt. A falling star outside his window streaks across the sky, and he thinks how he would do better than his father, thinks it was wrong to wish he was something he wasn't. He wishes his father had simply wished him happiness; that’s what he would wish his crayon cutout characters. And so he makes them all smile brightly.

4.

The paper boy Pinocchio has finished pinning up only wishes it had Pinocchio’s nose. It smiles, and wishes there was any way to show it was lying as it did. The lamp above gets so hot after so many hours, and could his hand not hold onto the clay girl’s hair like this? He’d like to ask his creator, if he could imagine a way to communicate.

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