Free-Will Razor by Tim Boiteau
The talking puppets were everywhere.
The first, a googly-eyed yak, Ellen found in the coat closet when she was hanging up her Canada Goose parka. Yuk yuk yuk, it chortled. When she dumped her paper plate, smeared with butter cream frosting, into the trashcan, a fuzzy reptile parted its green lips. Burrrrrppp! Then, while she was freshening up in the restroom, the shower curtain stirred. With bated breath she drew it back and found a shaggy black mound wagging its leathery tail at her. The worst by far was the soggy, spindly little guy curled up in the coffee pot, screaming for mercy, but in every instance she closed her eyes and counted backward from 100 by 3s, stopping when she felt her heart grow calm, reopened her eyes, and the puppets had vanished.
Even so, she stuck with the virgin mimosas Brit had mixed up special for her.
As all the ladies sat around the living room, Ellen felt a mounting sense of dread like some creature slithering up the inside of her throat. Her skin crawled whenever her mother-in-law sipped her coffee and mmmed, and Aaron seemed to be pounding his fists and roundhousing the inside of her womb. With her mounting dread, the pile of baby shower gifts grew similarly mountainous—sleep sheep (aw!), stuffed avocado (aww!), little llama booties (AWWW!)—then Ellen began to notice the seams of their jaws and the lucent strings attached to their floppy wrists, making them dance and prate and sip the puppet-tainted coffee spiked with a lil sumpin sumpin. The paper ceiling of Brit’s family room had been peeled back and above them, above Ellen and all the essential and not-so-essential gals in her life, gaped a darkness swallowing up the bundles and bundles of string, and out of which fifty-odd googly eyes ogled them.
So that’s where they all went to, Ellen thought.
Below, the anthropomorphic eyes on all those bobbing heads of her friends and family watched in expectation as she with shaking hands opened the last package beside the colossal diaper cake and the impractical, button-covered. The tag on this one read, To Ellen, From The Puppets!
“Puppets? Who’s that?” puppet-Brit wagged a half-jokey finger at puppet-Fiona, who relayed the accusation right back, the result of a complex orchestration of string pulling. “Oh my god, I just know this’ll be adorbs.”
Ellen ripped off the paper, opened the box, and found a card and a giant utility knife which had an … Aztecan je ne sais quoi.
“What the hell?” Her mother-in-law said, Greek-chorusing everyone’s disappointment.
Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of a Free-Will Razor, the card read.
Press button to activate, then start slicing the Bonds of Determinism!
Expecting something light-sabery to happen, Ellen pushed the button, and the device went gloop! and a triangle of neon pink flowed out—light-sabery indeed, but the pink was incongruous with the shower’s baby-boy blue tone.
Clearly on the same wavelength, puppet-Brit yapped, “Oh, I get it, is this a Star Wars thing? Aww!”
Ellen stood, and her hands no longer her own, she swung the blade over Brit’s head and arms, slicing her best friend’s strings first. The razor didn’t crackle or hum, but rather seemed to swallow up the sound around it.
A gasp filled in the deathly silence, then screams.
“What?” Ellen said, turning towards stunned friends, family, and colleagues. “I’ve liberated her.” Their lifelike heads were spattered with blood for some reason.
Next came puppet-mother-in-law, who, when freed from the Bonds of Determinism, dropped her coffee on Brit’s high-end leather couch. At least the china survived.
Blood was spouting from somewhere, but for the life of her Ellen couldn’t say where.
From up above in the starry sky of wiggle eyes, laughter began to burble down.
Because I’m freeing them, Ellen thought, as she swung the Free-Will Razor over puppet-Fiona’s head. An occasion of joy and celebration. A free-will shower!
Heavy from baby and all that extra baggage of flesh and fluid, she nearly toppled over from the force of swinging the blade, but she caught herself and lunged onward into the crowd of scattering women, women desperate to cling to their bondage.
“Stand still and be free!” she shouted into the room.
Few listened.
Half of the baby shower crowd passed through the crucible of freedom, the crucible of the Free-Will Razor, and had their strings sliced, the weight of free will dragging them down at the moment of liberation, for they mostly lay sprawled on the floor or across the blood-stained furniture. The other half ran off into the snowstorm, vanishing in the roil of white.
The strings of the liberated coiled up, growing brittle, then dematerialized.
Out of breath, Ellen plopped back down on the couch, her body delicious with exhaustion. Closed her eyes.
Then she stirred. She’d forgotten someone.
Aaron.
She looked down at her swollen belly and saw that the lucent strings, shining in the light as if woven from pulverized pearl, shot up and into her own body.
This one will be difficult to free, she thought, maneuvering the blade towards her sternum.
