I thought it would be over.
But stories like this never end where you think they should.
The stage was gone, yes. The strings cut. The smiles undone.
But something had stayed.
Inside me.
It started with the splinters.
In my fingertips. In my gums. In my voice.
I'd speak and feel a catch in my throat, like thread tugging from the inside.
I'd run my hands under warm water and see flecks of sawdust swirling down the drain.
At first, I told myself it was trauma. Nerves. Residual fear.
But then the cracking started.
In my joints.
My knees would creak.
My neck would twist too far without pain.
And when I looked in the mirror one morning, the whites of my eyes had turned slightly... glassy.
Not fully.
But just enough.
Enough to know the show had left its mark.
---
I didn't tell anyone.
Velmont Hollow was healing.
Children played again.
Laughter came without puppet strings.
Even the church bells rang like real bells now.
They didn't whisper anymore.
But I... couldn't join them.
I kept hearing it.
Not the string's voice.
Mine.
The one I gave back.
Now it echoed, constantly, inside my skull like a looped recording:
> "We gave you a voice to remember." "You returned it." "But the memory remains."
I walked through town and people nodded kindly.
Some avoided eye contact.
Some looked at me like a hero.
But I knew better.
They didn't see the way my fingers moved when I wasn't watching.
The way they twitched as if remembering how to hold puppet strings.
---
One night, I went to the edge of the Hollow.
The forest still stood dark and twisted, but the air was clearer.
I stood before the old tree.
The one I had buried the puppet beneath.
Its bark had split.
And from within, red thread spilled like veins exposed.
In the dirt where I had once dug, a hole had opened again.
Inside:
A single, child-sized puppet.
Unfinished.
One arm still raw wood.
One eye still missing.
But I knew who it was.
Me.
A version of me that never got free.
The part that still danced.
And in the branches above, a voice:
> "Curtain never truly falls, Jonah."
Mr. Grin was gone.
But something older had taken his place.
Something deeper.
The memory of performance.
The role I'd played.
The hollow I left behind.
---
I didn't run.
I sat with the puppet.
Stared at it.
And waited.
It never moved.
Never spoke.
But as dawn broke, I heard something:
Applause.
Faint.
From beneath the earth.
Like a buried theater was still clapping.
Not for horror.
Not for terror.
But for completion.
For the end of Act I.
And the beginning of something else.
Not darkness.
Not light.
Just a boy made of splinters.
Carrying the memory of what it means to be controlled—
And what it means to break free.