The Pinocchio Complex
A small boy with matted brown hair and small, painted blue eyes sat on a shelf looking out a window into the night sky. The black expanse above him stretched as far as all of his dreams stacked end to end. The boy tugged on his marionette strings and felt their threads pulling on his wooden skin, holding him back from plummeting off the shelf that was his home.
Though he’d ventured into the open air of the outside world many times with his father’s help, the boy sat on that shelf every night for almost six years. He’d pretended to walk before, imitating the act of strolling down a street. He’d even repeated things back to overgrown children to look like he understood what they were saying. The boy had also experienced the electricity of anger inside him when he’d been made fun of. The wind always dried his painted tears as he feigned running away — though he was still caught in a tangle of twine.
But this night was different. His shelf was too small for him now, and tomorrow his strings would be cut.
Peeking in through a crack in the door, his father watched the boy. He was not ready. Everything up until now had felt pretend and wooden — but now a truer childhood would begin, with or without the father to protect his little marionette from harm and doubts. If only the little boy could believe, as his father had always felt, that he was capable of great things, and many smaller, important connections.
But this is the life of a performer. The show arrives, the dates are set, and the rehearsals finish. It was time to remove to the strings and the rails. To venture before the incandescence. For both the boy and his father, it was time to become real, and start the life they were meant to lead.
