The Man loved using his puppets. He could handle them with complete power, he could order them to do anything he could think of. The puppets were loyal, brainwashed, and without creativity. In all of his free time, the man would make his puppets partake in futile endeavors: wars one day, treaties the next. The dolls were neutralized and had no complaints, for the Man governed his puppets with an iron fist. The Marionettes were not intellectual, they were not creative, they hardly even communicated with each other.



The Man liked it this way, because he was a control freak, but could not control much other than his puppet people. He didn’t have a very good life outside of his imaginary world; the Man’s wife cheated on him regularly and although he lived an exemplary life (his income was high, his friends were rich, and his two-faced wife was very pretty) he was not satisfied with his situation. He would wake up in the morning with a normal routine in mind: he would go to work, the Man would sit in his high floor office and drink dark coffee, and then he would go home and play with his little pieces of string and wood and fabric.



This play was extremely important to him, since he felt it compensated for his lack of control over the people around him (which he felt he needed). The Man would distribute laws and judgements onto his puppets according to “skin” color and dress caliber. He would punish them, lock them away in a cupboard in isolation for committing a crime that he made them do.
He had fun controlling and administering his people.



One day, the Man’s wife deserted him. Leaving him devastated, he turned quickly to alcohol. He started slacking off at work and spending more and more time directing his puppets. The dolls were beginning to realize how boring their days were, involuntarily following a schedule set down by a man they did not even know personally. Meanwhile, the Man started flooding his body with the euphoria of Benzedrine alongside the alcohol. His iron grip loosened, and he didn’t notice that the puppets were starting to stray away from his stone-set routines and starting, instead, to create wonderful murals and begin to socialize.




The figurines had never known such ecstasy as the joy of creating, as the Man had never known such ecstasy that came from his drugs. The Man started noticing, through the haze that was his vision, disgusting colors on the walls he had built from nothing, diverse clothes on the “people” he had controlled so perfectly, and an all around feeling of happiness radiating from his puppets. He was furious. The Man set stricter rules, and punished every doll for using their own minds. But it was much too late, the puppets had already started the “evil work” of individualism. They broke the prisons and swarmed the Man’s streets and painted the buildings all hues and talked and enjoyed themselves, everything that the Man hated. He wept and screamed at the marionettes, but they didn’t listen to him. The Man climbed into his study and drowned himself in bourbon.