Violet awoke as from a dream.
Monster was dead.
Her puppet had been her constant companion
since she was 14.
She remembered the late autumn afternoon
when he got his name,
soon after she got him,
when, upon enduring the 4th or 5th day
of Monster’s week-long tantrum,
trying to get off his strings,
she was utterly reduced to tears,
and her father said,
Alright, that’s it!
We’re turning that monster back in,
getting our money back,
and getting you a golden retriever puppy!
but Violet refused to go back
and admit defeat before
the evil Master of Puppets.
Now, awakening as from a dream,
Violet found herself in a room
she’d never seen before.
Bare, with just a desk
and floating above it a hover globe
with its blinking heliostat.
Monster’s little body was curled up
on the floor, as if asleep,
on the cap she’d been knitting,
his strings carefully wound up beside him.
In her mind’s eye, she saw
the reflection of her mother’s face,
china blue eyes, careful chin
and easy smile,
and the street beyond, the dingy storefronts,
blaring lights, and harried passersby.
She shuddered to think of her now,
escorted by Shadows to the waiting arms
of the Rubik’s Cube.
She thought about the Double Eagle,
the dreadful coin her father designed,
the ridiculous hope she could
bribe her mother out of prison
with a single piece of gold.
If her father had filed a missing person’s report,
which he almost certainly had,
she faced the Rubik’s Cube herself, now,
and the dreaded re-partitioning,
if she was found, or the Rat Colony.
The Rat Colony.
Once, when she was little,
she went into her father’s office
where she was never ever supposed to go,
and opened a file from the Rat Colony,
Torvik Antares, and was transfixed
by the photograph, his youth,
like a wine-pourer on an isle
of silver apples, the careful incisions,
the un-seeing bomb-crater eyes.
Staring for a moment that was a lifetime,
she tore herself away from the photo,
and replaced everything exactly as she found it,
but she was sure her father knew.
For months thereafter she was haunted
by a dream of a frigid night
outside the Arctic blast,
of Torvik climbing in through the window,
slipping into bed with her
with delicate frozen hands,
and her father bursting in on them
and saying
I told you never ever to go in there!
What do you think will happen now?
Violet looked around the room.
Outside was a featureless residential landscape,
the darkening evening.
She tried to take stock of her situation,
and failed.
Nothing made sense.
She moistened the tip of her finger,
reached out and flicked
the hover globe,
let it spin.
Coin of the Realm 