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His father is speaking with someone in his study, voice rumbling within — perhaps just beyond the door, the puppet thinks, forever wanting his creator closer: defying the limits of bodies and skin and all sense of decorum, for he is inhuman and no matter what worldly context was pressed upon him for his awakening, propriety is irrelevant in the grand scheme of his insatiable need.
Ear pressed to the door now, hands grazing the surface, imagining not wood beneath his fingertips but the soft, leathery skin of his father: feeling the way his lips move, making those sounds of his, those words; wrinkles creasing round his mouth like deep-set commas from the arduous tomes that fill the ceiling-high bookshelves.
The puppet still has a grin plastered across his face once he realizes that his father isn’t talking to a person: it’s that portrait of a boy he is monologuing at — that painting with reddened cheeks that speak of either a cold day or harsh slaps — and when he hears his father say, “I wish he were dead, Carlo, I wish he would die,” the smile is frozen on his lips as nails leave long, mournful claw marks upon the door.