PinnochioA Story by AnaPinocchio I stood outside of my old orphanage, my suitcase packed and ready
beside me. Icy needles of cold stabbed through my clothes and into my skin,
adding to the growing frost I already felt inside of me. Gusts of wind whipped my wild red curls
around my face, but I made no move to push them back. A
rusty red truck lumbered its way up the winding gravel driveway, the tires toiling
to navigate through the ice and snow. I took a step back when it finally
screeched to a stop in front of me. The door swung open and a small scrawny boy
jumped out into the snow. He had a huge, dopey grin on his face and was quick
to throw his arms around me. I hesitated
before slowly hugging him back. He smelled oddly of wood, as if he’d spent all
day in the forest. “Hey,
Scarlet!” the boy said excitedly, pulling away from me. Fat snowflakes fell
into his tangled dark brown hair, and he brushed them out impatiently. His
twelve-year-old grin grew persistent when he realized I wasn’t going to return
the greeting. “Aren’t you glad you’re finally going to be able to leave this
place? You’re gonna live with us!” I
smiled weakly at him before glancing into the truck at the man sitting in the
driver’s seat. He beamed at me and gave a short wave. “Why don’t you help her
with her stuff, Kyle?” he called out. Kyle
rushed around me to grab my suitcase and waved off my help as he heaved it into
the bed of the truck. I hesitated and took one last look back at the orphanage
before climbing into the truck. The drive back to Kyle’s house was long, and
the whole time I kept warding off the questions Kyle and his grandfather threw
at me. Instead, I listened to the crackling words coming out of the radio. The
announcer kept going back to kidnappings that had happened recently, six male children
around the age of seven who had gone missing in the woods. It wasn’t the first
time it had happened; apparently over twenty boys had vanished into the woods
since last month. “Such
a shame,” Kyle’s grandpa, who had told me to call him Gep, muttered to himself.
Kyle shrugged. “I
don’t think they should’ve been hanging out around the woods so late,” he said.
I ignored both of them and closed my eyes, only opening them when the truck
came to a stop in front of a log cabin. The cabin was tiny and obviously decrepit;
the tin roof was rusted and spotted in white, and big green splotches of mold
painted the sides. Gep ushered me inside while Kyle stopped to get my stuff. “Who’s
there?” A hoarse, crabby voice yelled from inside the cabin after Gep knocked. “Just
us, dear!” Gep called. “And our newcomer, Scarlet!” A
second later the door swung open, and a small, bony thing of a woman tugged us
inside. “Hurry, Hurry!” she hissed. “You know how dangerous it is to be out in
the open!” I
stumbled through the threshold and gave her a confused glance. “What are you
looking at?” she snapped. Her eyes had a wild kind of glow in them, and when
she spoke it sounded as if she needed to cough something up. I looked away. “I’ll
show you to your room, Scarlet,” Gep said, scooting in front of me and leading
the way down the hall. Along the way he pointed out the rooms that we passed,
stopping at one door in particular and giving me a stern stare. “This is my
workroom. No one goes in there, and there’s no exceptions for you, alright?” I
nodded. He led me the rest of the way to my room, then left me to get settled. I
collapsed on the bed and kicked off my shoes, relieved to be by myself. Like
the way it’d been for the last four years. I didn’t move when the door creaked
open and Kyle slid inside with my small suitcase. He positioned it at the end
of the bed then plopped down on the floor, silent. “What
are you doing?” I murmured. “How’d
you get into the orphanage, Scarlet?” “What?”
I turned my head. The smell of wood hit me like a truckload of bricks, and I
turned over, coughing. When I was finished I rolled over again and stared up at
the cracks in the ceiling, counting my breaths. “How about you tell me why you
live with your grandparents. Then I’ll tell you what happened to me.” Silence.
Then--“Okay.” Kyle sat up on his heels and looked at me from across the bed.
“Grandpa Gep says that my parents were murdered when I was a baby.” I
stiffened and sat up on the bed. “That must’ve been scary.” Kyle shrugged and
blinked at me expectantly. I sighed. “My parents died, too, but I don’t know
how. I lived with my grandma until I was eleven, and after she went missing I
was taken in by the orphanage.” Kyle opened his mouth, but a scream and a
shatter from outside interrupted him. We both looked at each other before
rushing out toward the source of the noise. Kyle’s
grandma stood in the middle of the living room, her bloody hands clutching a
shattered glass hand mirror. She was alone, though it seemed as if she couldn’t
realize that. “You and your stupid puppets,
Geppetto!” she screamed, waving the mirror around wildly. “Why did you bring
that girl here if you knew this would happen?! How do I know you didn’t bring
her here to harm us?!” Her savage eyes swung around the room, finally settling
when they caught sight of me. “You,”
she hissed, taking a step toward me. Kyle shoved me aside. “Grandma,”
he warned, his voice suddenly deadly cool. I froze in shock, watching this
transformation overcome my overly bouncy, carefree friend. His grandma ignored
him and continued toward me, the broken mirror clutched in her hand so that
beads of blood welled up from beneath her cuts. “Grandma, please. You heard
Grandpa. He needs her"I mean, he said you can’t touch her.” Kyle pushed me
further aside, causing me to stumble and fall. In the same moment that I hit
the ground there was a loud cry, a cry of pain and outrage. And then there was
a thud. I lifted my head from the floor, blinking away bright spots. Kyle stood
over his grandma, both hands clamped over his mouth in shock. I frowned and
looked down at his grandma. She wasn’t moving. “I--" he stammered. “Kyle,”
I whispered. “What have you done?” Kyle’s
eyes snapped over to me. His hands had moved to his nose, and he groaned, clutching
it tightly. “I didn’t mean to,” he finished. “I didn’t.” “Is
she…” “Oh,
God, Scarlet.” Kyle tugged on his nose, hard, as it were going to come off. “I
didn’t mean to. They’ll come for me. Help me, Scarlet, oh God.” I
scrambled to sit up and pushed myself against the wall. “Who’s coming for you?”
I breathed, too horror-struck to get up. Kyle collapsed to the floor beside me,
yanking at his nose and sobbing. “The
puppets!” He cried. “The puppets, they’re coming to take me back like they took
my mom and my dad. They’ll kill me, I know it, help me!” “What?” The
ground beneath us began to rumble, and I grappled the wall for purchase. Kyle
was still holding his nose and crying that it hurt, but his voice was just
becoming a running background to the roar in my ears. “Kyle, where’s Gep?” I
gasped. A
loud clattering sound filled the room, like wooden bullets were raining down
onto the floor. The cabin was still shaking, and the crash of a door opening
down the hall startled me. Clatter, rattle, click. Clatter, rattle,
click. It was the sound like that of wooden soldiers marching in a
parade, though beyond this cacophony of wood against floorboards I could just
make out the high-pitched giggles of little kids. “Kyle.”
I swallowed down the taste of bile in my mouth. “What’s happening?” When there
was no answer I turned beside me to ask again, but what I saw made me gasp and
scrabble back. Kyle
was slumped unconscious on the floor, his head lolling against his shoulder.
Except…from his face emerged a nose the size of a rolling pin, squeezed and
deformed. The cartilage on his nose was stretched so far and thin it looked
like you could see the nasal bone trying to jut out from underneath the tissue.
Before I could turn to the side and heave a great shadow filled the room, and I
suddenly noticed that the clattering sounds had stopped. I slowly lifted my
great weight of my head, only to be stopped short by the sight of what was
before me. Puppets.
Hundreds and hundreds of puppets as tall as the ceiling towered over me like
skyscrapers, all with great smiles carved into their wooden faces. Slowly,
slowly, their hinged jaws lowered down until I could see straight into their
mouths. And then they spoke. “Pinocchio,”
they said, their voices scraping like saw on wood. I glanced at Kyle, then back
to the puppets. They weren’t looking at him. They were drilling their painted
blue eyes into me. And, as one, their heads tilted to the side. “Will you turn
me back into a real boy?” “Come now, my little Pinocchios.” I gasped and everything spun faster as Gep stepped out from behind the puppets. “We’ll have you turned back to real boys in no time.” He rolled up his sleeve, but where there should’ve been flesh, there was a shiny wooden arm. He stroked it and said, “After all, it’s the death of another who gives life to the wood, isn’t it?” © 2015 AnaAuthor's Note
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4 Reviews Added on October 14, 2015 Last Updated on October 14, 2015 AuthorAnaILAboutHmmm, where to start...? Well, I'm Ana, first of all. I love to write and read, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside you know? No? I'm 18 now, and applying to college. I've been watching a lot o.. more..Writing
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