Ruby Red Marionette

thirtynine | philosophy

We decided that it's plausible to believe that being locked in this town was a foreshadow to being locked in our homes again. So to avoid being separated all over the place, we decided to stick together. The five of us were all at Isaiah's place. Yvette and Isaiah slept on his bed, Batul and I slept on the couch, and Tyler slept on the floor. With Batul's ceaseless rolling and turning at all hours of the night, I wondered if it was really necessary to have this impromptu sleepover.

Batul woke up first, at about five in the morning. She sat on the floor playing some weird instrumental music from her phone and was doing yoga. Her constant movement was driving me crazy, so I slammed Isaiah's uncle's pillow over my ears. That didn't work, but it was okay, because at around seven, she stopped. She just sat there with her eyes closed and her legs crossed, something I'd learned was called meditating. Whatever.

I couldn't go back to sleep, so I decided to stay up and make food. Batul and I ate sausages with bread and talked about the puppet masters.

While we talked, Yvette was the next to wake up. She told us that she usually didn't rise so early, but she was having a nightmare about yesterday's events. We invited her to join us in breakfast-eating and conspiracy-reviewing.

After that it was Isaiah, who we almost thought was sleep-walking with the way he trudged around the condo. When coming into the living room to see what we were doing, he tripped over Tyler and woke him from his slumber. Now we were all up, struggling to share the remainder of the breakfast. We all lay on the floor, forming a circle around the plate of food.

"Okay," Isaiah swallowed a piece of bread, "the only way we're going to get somewhere is by going to the root. So how did this start for us?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean, what was your first interaction with the Puppet Masters?"

We paused and pondered the question. We could have said anything—our first interaction with them could have happened when we were twelve. How were we supposed to know?

"My first interaction with them was when your Witness Protection Program house blew up." Yvette replied.

"That was my first, too." He said.

"Me too." Tyler and Batul said.

I was about to say that mine was when Under the Sea blew up, and it was, but then an image other than faces blowing up and pieces of the ceiling falling down came into my mind.

"Of course, mine was when my job blew up. But my second interaction, the recurring one, happened when I first saw milk and newspaper on someone's doorstep." I told them.

"Oh yeah," Yvette nodded. "I forgot about that."

"How could you forget? I cringe every time I see them on somebody's doorstep." Batul said.

"I've become immune to them," I said. "That's not a good thing. We've been focusing on the bombing a lot, but I think we need to give the other things some attention."

"What do we know about them?" Tyler asked.

"Well, I know that the newspapers are used to send messages to people. Devin told me that; the people involved with the business will send cryptic messages to each other within the newspapers. It's some kind of code language." I explained.

"What about the milk?"

"No one knows about that." I said.

"Maybe it's just a decoy. Maybe they put it with the newspaper to make things look more normal." Yvette suggested.

Batul shook his head. "No. People have been delivering newspapers by themselves for decades and it has always been normal."

"You're right," Isaiah said. "Nothing they ever do is random. There's a real reason for it being there."