The Motion of Puppets by Keith Donohue Page A

restoring the Back Room to its previous state. Before the Sisters could get away, Kay grabbed Olya by the brocade sleeve of her dress. “What roles are you talking about? Who is calling?”
    â€œEveryone must prepare for the puppet show,” she said and pulled away.
    â€œPlaces, please,” Mr. Firkin cried. “Is everything as it should be? Quickly, quickly, now. We must not let them notice anything amiss, or there will be hell to pay.”
    The lights went out. Thin strips of sunlight filtered through the edges of the back door and the cardboard window covering. The room was warming, the glass ticking as it expanded, the air rising from the floor. If only she could ride the wave and escape. Normally she faced a blank wall, but this morning she dared to change position and did not look away. The rest of the puppets assumed their inert countenances, dead eyes, blank expressions, as still as corpses. Quiet descended, heavy and expansive. She was alone again.
    The days were all the same in the Back Room. For the first few hours, she remembered her life before this life. Fleeting images crossed her mind. Her mother cutting out a silhouette from black cardboard, asking the five-year-old Kay to please sit still. At a high school gymnastics meet, the auditorium hushed while she prepared a dismount from the balance beam, her foot slipping, her hips wiggling, her shoulders throwing off her equilibrium, and then her father’s soft voice reaching her from the bleachers: be still. Her husband—not yet her husband—peering intently at her across a table of Indian food, the tail end of an argument over some silly ex-boyfriend, and she asks do you love me and he says: Still.
    Inside her head, she laughs at herself, as if she had any choice in the matter, since she could not will herself to be anything but still during the daytime. She wanted to move. She wanted to be more than a doll on a shelf. She wanted to see the man in the glass jar and wondered if he was waiting for her, out in the Front Room. Her thoughts disturbed her rest: when would the Quatre Mains and the Deux Mains come for her? What role would she play? She could no longer move on her own in the daytime. Nothing to be done but to wait in stillness.

 
    7
    She left a hole his mind tried to fill. Theo dreamt of finding Kay all the time, but every morning, she was still missing. He woke up tired and disoriented, and all he could remember was the hellish sensation of having been watched on his journey. Spied upon by tiny eyes of creatures hiding among the trees and hedges in the parks or from the old stone buildings that lined the twisting streets of the Basse-Ville, gremlins squirreled away in second-story windows shrouded by lace curtains.
    He shared the tale of the watchful eyes with Egon as they stopped for coffee at a sidewalk bistro near the Terrasse Dufferin. From their table, they could see the length of the grand esplanade that runs above the Saint Lawrence, crowded with tourists taking in the sights, the weather warm enough for shorts or skirts and sandals. The little man nodded demurely, and Theo wondered if he had somehow offended him, drawn a subconscious comparison between the gremlins and the diminutive size of his only friend in Québec. A breeze rippled the flags that flew above the square. A light sky above the river was purled with clouds. A perfect day in July. Kay had been gone for three weeks.
    â€œI used to feel that I was being watched, too,” said Egon. “Or rather, it was a case of being scrutinized all the time. Even now you can see it in their eyes, how quickly some people turn away when they first notice me.”
    A pair of tourists shambled up in matching Québec je t’aime T-shirts.
    â€œThen they look away. Guilty buggers. There but for the grace. And then they look back. Curious as the killed cat. And then away again to show you how liberal and unprejudiced they are: that’s okay, you are