Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (41 page)

“Sh, sh,” Mister Leaf said. “It’s not that bad. We can fix it.”

“But what will I tell Ramble?” she wailed. “And Elbow?”

“Oh, you mustn’t tell them anything,” Mister Leaf said hastily. “Why, if they found that you’d let this happen, they’d—they’d—why, they’d put strings on you, that’s what they’d do! They’d screw little eyehooks into your elbows and knees, and run black silk strings through them, and they’d never let you move your own arms and legs again, just to make sure that this could never happen again. Do you want that? No, I didn’t think so. Now, the rain has stopped—I think it’s time for you to go home.”

Afterward, Still couldn’t remember how she had found her way home. She must have fallen, though, because by the time she recognized the streets again, she had an ugly dent in her cheek. All she could think about was her violin—her poor, scarred violin.

Her joints and limbs were aching with the damp and cold by the time she reached her front door. She practically fell through it into Elbow’s arms.

“Still!” he cried out. “Still, honey, what’s wrong? What happened?”

“I—I fell,” she sobbed. She held up her violin. “And I—I—”

“Sh, sh, sh,” he said, rocking her in his arms. “Come in here where it’s warm. Ramble! Ramble! Come quick!”

The two puppets sat their daughter down on the couch in the living room and gave her a cup of warm linseed oil to drink. “Here, let me see that,” Ramble said gently. She took Still’s chin in her hand and turned her head from side to side to look at the dent in her cheek. “Oh, it’s not so bad,” she said after a moment. “A little bit of putty, and some careful sanding, and you’ll be as good as new.”

“Why, it’ll even make you look more grown-up,” Elbow said. “Just like the dimples in my cheeks. I wasn’t carved with them, you know. I got this one when I fell out of a tree, and this one when—”

“But what about my violin?” Still interrupted. She had wrapped three thick blankets around herself, but she still felt cold, cold, cold. Even with a big gloop of honey, the linseed oil tasted like ashes. All she could think about was the black scorch on her violin.

“We’ll take it to the shop tomorrow and get it fixed, I promise,” her mother said gently. She took the violin from her daughter’s stiff hands and laid it aside. “Now, why don’t we put you to bed? You can clean up your room tomorrow.”

Still lay in bed a long time the next morning. Her window grew brighter as the sun rose, then dimmed as it passed overhead. Her mother and father came in to see her a couple of times, but she closed her eyes and pretended that she was sleeping.

Finally her mother brought the doctor to see her. He had narrow shoulders and a beaky nose, and wore wire-rimmed glasses without any glass in them. He put his stethoscope on Still’s tummy and chest and forehead and listened to her clockwork go
tick, tock, tick, tock
. Then he sighted along her arms and legs, one by one, to see if they had been warped by the rain.

“There’s nothing wrong with her wood,” he said to Ramble. “She’s as sound as the day she was made. And that dent in her cheek isn’t as bad as it looks—I’m sure you’ll be able to fix that up in no time.”

“Then what is it?” her mother asked. “What’s wrong?”

The puppet doctor shook his head. “I don’t know. Perhaps her clockwork got a bit jumbled up in the fall. I’m sure it will sort itself out if you give her some time.”

So Still got to stay home from school that day, and the day after that. Each morning she lay in bed until her mother or father came to get her up. She brushed her teeth and oiled her joints and got dressed, then went down to the couch and sat under the blankets, staring out the window at the carts going past on the street and the balloons going by in the sky. Sometimes her fingers twitched, as if she was playing the violin, but she never mentioned it, or wondered where it had gone.

But all the while, Still felt like she was floating in dark, still water. Whenever she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, the dent on her cheek made her look like someone else. She stared into her eyes, and saw a stranger. “You mustn’t tell,” she whispered. “They’ll put strings on you if you do.”

On the third day, her father came into her room with a big smile painted on his face. “If you’d like to get up and get dressed, there’s something waiting for you downstairs,” he said.

“All right,” Still said. A moment went by. She didn’t move.

“Oh, come on, daffodil,” Elbow said. “It’ll cheer you up, I promise!”

“All right,” Still said again. Somehow, being cheered up didn’t seem to matter very much.

When she came downstairs, a big box wrapped in brightly-colored paper was waiting for her on the kitchen table. The creases were as sharp as the edge of a knife, and the folds were so clever that her father eventually had to show her how to get the paper off without tearing it.

She set the paper aside and took the lid off the box. “Well?” her father asked. “What do you think?”

Her violin lay inside the box. Fresh strings had been put on it, each one a different color. Its body had been sanded down smooth and re-varnished. There was only a faint, shallow groove to show where—where—

“What do you think?” her father asked again. “Doesn’t it look just as good as new?”

“I guess so,” Still said. “Thank you.”

“Well all right then,” Elbow said jovially. “Now, if you hurry, you can still get to school in time for juggling.”

“I guess so,” Still said. She stood up and began to walk toward the front door.

“Aren’t you going to take your violin?” Elbow asked.

Still stopped, then said, very softly, “I guess so.” She picked up the violin and walked out into the street.

Still trudged along the cobblestone streets to the school. The sky was a warm, clear blue, and little clockwork birds were chirping in the trees. The puppets she passed chattered to one another as if it was just another day. She ran her thumb back and forth over the faint groove in the top of the violin that was the only sign of—of— She pushed the thought out of her head.

Still didn’t stop when she reached the school gate. She just set her books on a bench very carefully for anyone who wanted them and kept walking. She didn’t pay any attention to where she was going—she just let her own weight carry her down, down, down.

As she walked, the streets grew narrower, then dirtier. Gaps began to appear in the cobblestones, and tendrils of fog began to fill the air around her. They grew steadily thicker until Still could barely see from one side of the street to the other.

And as she walked, the puppets around her started to change as well. Their faces became cracked and worn. Some of them had so little paint left that it was impossible to tell who they were, or how they might feel. None of them looked straight at her, and she was careful not to look straight at them.

Finally Still reached a dead end. She was too tired and hungry to think. An old banana crate full of newspapers lay on the ground beside her. She climbed into it, curled herself around her violin, closed her eyes, and fell straight into a deep, dreamless sleep.

She woke up once, in the middle of the night, when something cold and hard scampered across her leg. “Tee hee,” it giggled. She hugged her violin close to her chest and shivered. She’d never seen a glass rat, not for real, but other puppets had whispered stories about them at sleepovers. What they wanted more than anything was oil to stop them squeaking, and if the only place to get it was from a puppet, well, “That’s why they have diamond teeth,” everyone would whisper in unison.

It took her a long time to get back to sleep.

She woke up hungry the next morning. She hid her violin behind an old sign for a watchmaker’s shop at the end of the alley, then trudged up through the fog to a small market.

Still folded a piece of newspaper to make a box (now, who had taught her how to do that?) and set it on the sidewalk. She stood there for a moment, as still as her name. The wind felt like ice water on the dent on her cheek. Slowly, she ducked her head down, as if she had a violin on her shoulder. Slowly, very slowly, she raised her arm as if she held a bow.

And then she began to play. A few puppets stopped to watch, and then a few more. They stared at the strange sight of a young, beautifully-painted puppet playing a violin that wasn’t there. Still didn’t make a sound, but the puppets around her would have sworn that they could almost—almost—hear music. It made one puppet think of black butterflies fluttering among blood poppies under a full moon. It made another think of a hawk circling patiently over a snowy field in winter, just waiting for the rabbit’s clockwork to run down.

When Still stopped, the puppets around her sighed. A peg-legged old puppet in a soldier’s uniform pulled a grimy green gumdrop from his pocket and tossed it into Still’s paper box.
Plop plop plop
went a few other pieces of candy. Still bowed gracefully, then picked up her takings and trudged back into the fog.

And so began the pattern of her days. Every night she found a box or doorway, and curled up with her violin in her arms. Every morning she hid the violin somewhere safe, then walked into the market to play her silent music. She forgot to remember that she had once slept in a warm, dry bed, or that the puppets who had made her had loved her. The worn-out puppets who worked in the markets on the edge of the fog wondered about her for a while, then found other things to wonder about. In no time at all, she was just another nameless toy.

From time to time, though, properly-painted puppets from the heart of the City wandered through. The nice ones came to buy old, broken-down things to mend—chairs with wobbly legs, flutes that were missing a few notes, or picture frames that didn’t hang straight. The others, who weren’t so nice, came for the smell of the fog. They walked around the market in groups, making jokes with one another and staring at everyone. Some of these puppets pointed at Still and laughed, but there were always a few who would give her licorice or even some chocolate if she would pretend to play for them. A few even asked her to come back with them and give them a private concert, but Still looked at their bright, shiny eyes and shook her head.

As the weeks went by, Still got to know a few of the other puppets who lived in the fog. She told them that she had been stolen from a far-away villages by lions, and sold to pirates who had brought her across the sea to work as a slave in the glue mines. “How did you escape?” they asked. “Oh, that’s a secret,” she said. “If I tell you, you might tell them, and then if I’m ever caught again, I won’t be able to get away.” They didn’t believe her, and she knew they didn’t, but they pretended right along with her, just as she pretended to believe that the one-armed puppet who pasted leaves on the trees had once been a princess, or that the twins who boiled scraps of canvas in an old black kettle to get the oil out were really magicians in disguise.

From time to time, though, Still heard Elbow’s or Ramble’s voice, very faintly, calling her name. Whenever that happened, she whispered, “
You
don’t belong here anymore,” and hid herself until the voices went away.

And once, just once, she saw a puppet she almost recognized. His clothes were blue and orange, and he wore a polka-dot hat. He had black curls painted on his forehead, and a warm smile painted on his face. He was with a crowd of other puppets, all of them so painted and polished that they looked brand new. As she watched him, he pointed at the little cans of fish scales that one tired old puppet was trying to sell and laughed, “Ah hoo hoo hoo . . . Ah hee hee hee . . .”

Still hid behind a pile of old dreams until the puppet was gone. When she finally ventured out again, she played her silent music faster and more furiously than she ever had before. Her arm practically whirred as it flew back and forth. No one gave her any candy that day, and even a few of the puppets in the market’s stalls muttered about her under their breath.

And so the days passed, each colder than the one before, until one morning Still woke up to find a faint dusting of snow on the dirty streets around her. She wrapped her violin in newspaper, then climbed up a drainpipe so that she could tuck it under the eaves of a warehouse whose windows had been boarded up. She walked the long way around to the market, just so that she could see how the snow made the city look. She played all day, but only a few puppets went past, and none put any candy in her paper box.

As the sun began set, Still trudged back down into the fog, circling the block once to make sure that no-one was following her before climbing up the drainpipe to get her violin.

It was gone.

Still felt around under the eaves. It wasn’t there. She leaned out as far as she could so that she could grope around the next section. It wasn’t there either.

Panic grated in her gears like sand. The dent on her cheek seemed to throb. Where was her violin? Where had it gone?

Still was just about to start whimpering when a grating voice above her said, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Still was so startled that she almost fell off the drainpipe. She looked up. The voice had come from a beaky gray head that sat atop a short, barrel-shaped body. The figure had long arms, and wings folded up against its back. It was a gargoyle!

“Some crows saw you hide it this morning,” the gargoyle said in a voice that sounded like bricks being scraped together. “You know what they’re like for taking things, so I thought I had better keep it safe for you.”