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Myrmidon

The Organ Damage of Puppet Shows

By F. Simon GrantPublished 7 years ago 6 min read
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Myrmidon :oR: The Organ Damage of Puppet Shows

Dexter Opopanax Jr was a ventricle who suddenly gained sentience and burst from the chest of his father, Dexter Opopanax Sr., splitting off from the other three fourths of his heart through blood and bone to be born two days before Christmas, killing his father instantly, on his birthday by coincidence, now the birthday of both beings. Cecily Opopanax, who’d been checking ovulation charts for optimum fertility, now splattered with blood from the emerging ventricle, heard the eviscerated organ speaking, tube edges coming together as a mouth: “You are my mom. What adventures you must have planned for me!”

He lived his life just as this bloody tube, inching around like an inch worm, and Cecily Opopanax cared for him like a son, or more accurately she cared for him the way Cecily Opopanax might care for a son who is a ventricle burst from her husband’s chest.

Cecily Opopanax was a puppetmaker who lived in a small town called Grandiceps, home of the only puppetry college in the nation, Grandiceps International College of Puppetry Arts. When she carried her ventricle son around in a birdcage decked out like a child’s bedroom, this was only moderately unusual in a community of puppeteers. Cecily always held her arms down straight, no elbow bending, except when carrying around her son’s birdcage, and she always held her head tipped down so she’d look at you only from the tops of her eyes, eyes made dark with no eye shadow. She dressed like birdcages but not like the birdcages conceived of by humans as decent living spaces for birds with their unnecessary gaudiness but the sort of birdcage birds might build for their own as homes perhaps or as holding facilities for the criminal or insane.

And this is how she was at the funeral of Dexter Sr. a few days after their son’s birth, no black at all in show-clothing, only her own black. Dexter Sr. was a Bible scholar and requested a funeral in the ancient tradition, including myrrh embalming, and considering their community, myrrh embalming wasn’t hard to come by. Cecily fixated on the word “Myrmidon” the whole funeral—purely based on how much more awesome that word was than funerals—and muttered it as she fidgeted and looked for ways to escape.

As kids will, Dexter Jr had a lot of questions as he grew with intelligence astounding for a small lump of brainless flesh designed for only the activity of pumping blood, like: “Am I the only sentient ventricle?” and “Did I kill daddy when I was born?”

But his mom would say, “Don’t be silly. All sentient ventricles are born that way. Like any creature that feeds off the last life of the womb it’s born in.”

“Why don’t I see other sentient ventricles around?”

“They all live in Ventricle Land, a beautiful place where every wall is crusted with rubies and every ventricle gets his own birdcage made of crystal that sings when the wind hits it.”

“When do I get to go to Ventricle Land?”

“When you’re mature enough to leave your momma, you will be visited by a myrmidon, a magical creature who’s part horse, part glyptadon, part seahorse. He’s like an aquatic horse covered in spiked armadillo armor and sea creature spikes and sea shells full of mother of pearl. The most beautiful creature you’ve ever seen.” She looked off in the distance out of the window as if she could see the myrmidons leaping on some bright hill past her viewing. “Don’t worry about that for right now, son. Drink your blood and go to sleep.”

The Ventricle Land stories became more elaborate every night: there were now four lands with different ruling systems and bestiaries. Upper Left Ventricle Land was Dexter’s favorite because everything was covered in lapis lazuli and the dominant species was the blue rabbitlion. Upper Right land of amber was dominated by winged wolves, Lower Right ruby land was a land of giant eyeless wormserpents who grind the rubies to red sand, and Lower Left land was a vast forest of jade where giant sheeplike grazing beasts with turtle legs creep across the land as mountains with forests on their backs. The myrmidon and the ventricle, as benign governing creatures, were the only ones who traveled between the lands and into the land of humans.

Dexter’s first birthday coincided with the show The Puppet Theatre of Grandiceps put on every Christmas, and the theme coming up was “We Three Kings,” but months earlier when Dexter overheard puppeteers and designers talking about gold, frankincense, and myrrh, he said, “Gold, frankincense, and myrmidon? Are they coming to take me home?”

“No, sweetie, let the grownups work,” Cecily said, and Dexter Jr. inched away because he was a very good boy.

Then Cecily explained Ventricle Land to all the other puppeteers planning the show. It was too adorable to resist as the other puppeteers seemed to come up with the same idea at the same time:

“Oh my God, we need to do a Ventricle Land show for his birthday!” They spent months planning the every detail of the play, making all the myrmidon puppets, little ventricle hand puppets, and puppets of all the other creatures Cecily Opopanax had described.

On the morning of Dexter’s birthday, two days before the Christmas show, the myrmidon puppets woke up Dexter in his birdcage and said, “It’s time to go.”

“What? Where?” Dexter Jr. said, still confused from sleep and squirming out from under his red-stained blanket.

“To Ventricle Land, of course!” the myrmidon puppet said. Puppet helpers placed Dexter Jr. on the myrmidon’s back, and they took him to various sets they built, miniatures of the four lands, and the final place: a decorated room with birthday cake and big blood shake for Dexter with a single candle sticking out of the end of a straw. Everybody laughed and had wonderful good feelings and loved each other.

But at the end of the party, Dexter said, “So when are we the myrmidons going to take me to Ventricle Land for real? After the party?”

“Oh sweetie…” Cecily couldn’t say anything, realizing only now the mistake she made. “It’s only a play. I thought you realized that.”

Dexter didn’t say anything more the rest of his birthday—didn’t move, didn’t finish his blood shake, muscles of his tube, only with a feigned alertness, resisted droop—and the awfulness of this silence and stillness was astounding for Cecily, more tragic than Dexter’s birth, like heavy air and white noise drowning out every other party squeal.

After that, Cecily stopped telling him stories.

That was when Dexter started running away from home. He never got very far. He was only an inch long and could barely scoot out of his birdcage. Sometimes Cecily let him get all the way to the door. She wondered what would happen if she just let him go. Would it be so bad?

Years later, Dexter Opopanax Jr was working as a tax assessor, technical school math degree hanging on his cubicle wall. He had to rely on others to put him in and take him out of cabs all day shuttling only back and forth between his work and his tiny, tiny apartment. At home, he’d drink one glass of blood at night and let the television play laugh tracks to drown out the dull endlessness of numbers still stuck inside of him until the following day when he had to start again.

Then one day a myrmidon showed up at his office. A real one, no puppet, unmistakable in its realness. Double big horse, nautical growths like deformed crustaceans, spiked armadillo-like armor. The myrmidon said, “Dexter Opopanax, it is time. Your true home awaits.”

He went with the myrmidon because why would he ever hesitate for a second? He lived in Ventricle Land and was incredibly happy his whole life. He missed his mom often. She was the one who knew the truth of this place, and he remained grateful forever she never lied to him.

Other than losing this woman he could never go back and see again, there was nothing bad whatsoever about the way his story ended.

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About the Creator

F. Simon Grant

I'm a fiction writer and a collage artist.

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