the assembled man and the talking toy

With the Endless Tree’s branches sprouting through the cosmos cracks in his workshop, the Assembled Man had an infinite supply of materials to carry out the duty the god had bestowed upon him. He worked diligently, piecing together countless toys across countless centuries, devoting himself to the craft of creation.

And when enough imagination had been put into the world that he no longer felt the need to create, he mended. Using his magnifying lenses, he peered at the globe which sat in the center of his work-desk, spinning it around and gazing through the windows and walls of homes all over the world, plucking free toys (some he had made, some made by the people) that had been forgotten, left-behind by children who had grown up, and brought them back to his little room between the realms.

There, he stitched buttons back onto their eyes and, after re-stuffing them, sutured their broken seams shut. He mended their cracks, making broken puzzles whole again, and brushed vibrant paints onto sun-washed porcelain. He fabricated new clothes, props, and characters for them, braided their hair, and told them of all the amazing things they were going to do when they left this lonely workshop.

“Don’t fret, you won’t be here long. You’re going to return to the rest of the world,” he’d say. “Because there’s one small part of it that doesn’t know you yet but will come to love you. A child whose best friend you’re going to become.”

The Assembled Man did this day-in, day out, for what seemed forever. Every moment was merely a repetition of every moment that came before it—that is, until one of the toys talked back to him, and what did it say?

“Where is he?”

The Assembled Man let the words hang in the air until all sound had run out of them. He had not heard the voice of another in such a long time that he didn’t quite understand it. At first, he checked the crackling furnace in his belly, wondering if something he had tossed in there—bits of excess fur, chips of wood, broken brushes—had crackled in an odd way. But then, just when he was about to resume work, it happened again.

“Where is he? Where is he?”

Laid across the scratch-ridden, paint-splattered work-desk in front of him was a toy roly-poly, a plastic piece that, when you tugged the string, curled into a tight ball. It had lost numerous legs and he had spent the past few minutes shaving nubs off the Endless Tree’s branches, carving them, painting them silver, and gluing them onto it. Now he lifted the thing and turned it around across all four hands, searching for the culprit of the voice—when it rang out again, “Where is he, where is he, where is he?”

Certain it hadn’t come from the roly-poly, he put it down, pushed away from his work-desk, and meandered over to a shelf of misfits toys, where the yet-to-be-mended sat in carefully organized piles. There he found one rocking like a chair, its plastic body thump-thumping the wood beneath it. The other toys did not bend, or budge, or speak—but this one did all three at once! It twisted, it turned, and it said, over and over again: “Where, where, where, where?”

The Assembled Man watched it, unsure of what to do. Communication wasn’t part of his repertoire. He opened his mouth but couldn’t remember how a conversation was supposed to start so he snapped it shut. He’d observed millions of little talks that the people of the globe had had, but that was different than actually saying something. Should he start with ‘Hello?’ or should he introduce himself?

Eventually he decided to just pick the Talking Toy up. It didn’t like that very much. The feisty thing beat at his wooden hands with its own, one of which had its fingers melted together into one flat shape. It was missing one leg, and both its arms had been hot-glued back into its sockets, likely by a mother hoping to quell a wailing child. It wasn’t one he had dreamed up, this was uniquely human. He couldn’t decipher what exactly it was supposed to be, but one thing was certain—

“—You were well-loved.”

That stiffened the Talking Toy’s assailing hands. It looked at The Assembled Man and said: “He takes me everywhere. Ever since he was three, I’ve been the Boy’s best friend.”

The Assembled Man took the toy over to his desk. He did not say anything.

“I need to get back to the Boy,” the Talking Toy said. “He needs me!”

After being sat on the desk, the Talking Toy attempted to flee but, with one missing leg, it couldn’t do much more than like a fish out of water. So, the Assembled Man took it upon himself to fix that first. In the drawers to his work-desk were all manner of things collected from the globe, cleaned and ready to be reused—he plucked free a nib of plastic, what used to be an ink pen, and began molding it over the fire in his belly like softened clay. “But what if you can’t?” he asked.

“I will!”

“But sometimes, we can’t. Sometimes, we must move on.”

The words were coming easier to the Assembled Man than he thought they would.

He pulled the ink-pen out of the fire. It had been sculpted into a leg, given a hearty thigh and a big foot with a round kneecap joint connecting them. He dabbed a droplet of glue onto it, grabbed the Talking Toy (“I will! I will!”), and pressed it into the socket. When he pulled his hands away, the toy shook its new leg and marveled at it…then it took off running!

The Assembled Man caught it just before it fell over the edge of the desk.

“Let me go!” it screamed.

“If you fall, you’ll be even worse than you started off. So please, be more careful!”

“If you’re not gonna let me see him, then smash me to bits!”

The Assembled Man was about to scold him for acting like a child, then he realized that the Talking Toy had spent all of his years only with a child and was, in a way, a child himself. So, he set it down and said: “Do you know why you are here?”

The Talking Toy shook its head. “Why I’m here or where I am doesn’t matter!” it said. “I gotta get back to the Boy. His mama works late, and his papa isn’t around, and his sister’s in college, so he’s all alone all the time, and…”

The Assembled Man opened his mouth but, once again, was at a loss for words. Passing toys from one life into the next was a burden he’d grown accustomed to, and comforting them was a duty he took seriously, but…

…he’d never had to answer questions.

“Before bed, he told me: ‘tomorrow, we’re gonna go to a ball-game!’ That’s what he said. And he was bouncing-off-the-walls excited ‘cuz his mama was going and she worked two jobs and so she never got to go anywhere and he was gonna bring me, and…”

The plastic smile fixed permanently onto the Talking Toy’s face was disfigured by the anguished words pouring out of it. It threw its fists all around.

“…where is he!?”

The Assembled Man did the only thing he could think to do—he continued mending it, taking its melted-together hand and snipping its fingers apart. Soon the room was entirely silent save for the cht, cht, cht, of opening-and-closing scissors.

Finally, he said: “I do not know.” And: “Unfortunately, you will not see him again.”

This sucked the life out of the Talking Toy. It fell limp in the Assembled Man’s arms. He did not stop tending to it, now stripping the crusted glue from the underside of its shoulders. Repairing was the only way he knew how to make something feel better—but a broken heart was a broken heart. The soul could be armored-up but once a crack rippled through it…

Then, in a weakened whimper, it said: “I won’t ever see him again?”

To which the Assembled Man said: “No, you will not.”

The Assembled Man set the poor toy down on the table. It couldn’t even keep itself upright anymore. Its head, which was loose in its socket, drooped downward, falling out of place. He caught it with the tip of his finger, and said:

“But you made him very happy, didn’t you?”

The Talking Toy lifted its head and it clicked back into place. “What?”

“This Boy. You made him smile, and giggle, and I’m sure you listened to many mischievous tales of antics that went his way or didn’t?”

The Talking Toy thought about this. “He was lonely,” it said. “I spent a lot of time listening to him. It’s how I learned to talk—the other toys didn’t, but I did, and he thought that was so neat.”

The Assembled Man knew he had to pick his next words carefully. Maybe, he thought, patching together a broken heart wasn’t so different. Except instead of glue, and paint, and bits of wood or plastic, it was all about finding the right words, putting them in the right order, and letting a bit of feeling flow through them.

“Know what I think?” he said. “I think the Boy let you go on purpose.”

“On purpose!?”

The Assembled Man briefly hesitated, wondering if he’d said the wrong thing. But he truly believed in what he was about to say and so, letting the flame in his belly swell, putting some oomph into his words, he said: “I think that the Boy grew up. I think he made friends, met new people, and maybe even got to spend more time with his mama. I think he realized that, much as he loved you, his talking friend, he wasn’t lonely anymore. And I think he wanted you to move on. To help someone who was.”

“Move…on?” The Talking Toy spoke slowly, like deciphering a foreign language. “Move on…”

“You don’t wind up in my workshop unless such a thing is true.”

As the Talking Toy puzzled that out, the Assembled Man ran hot glue around the nape of its neck, keeping its head from falling loose.

“But you shouldn’t think of it as an ugly thing—rather, it’s quite beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“You did something special and you don’t even realize it.”

The Talking Toy curiously tilted its now stuck-down head.

“You helped him grow up.”

The Assembled Man carefully inspected it all over, brushing dust out of its joints, checking for any missed dinks or dents. Really, he was stalling, cutting up his words and stringing them back together. He saw not the scrapes on the toy’s check, but what lurk beneath, the heart once-again beating.

He wondered, what would the god have said next? He decided it would have told him exactly one thing: the truth.

“And because of that, things are changing. That’s terrifying, I know. I have experienced it myself—loving, and losing, someone forever. But you are not condemning them to your memories, Talking Toy, you are cherishing. Every smile you brought the Boy, or that he brought you, you will now both bring to the world.”

The Assembled Man set the Talking Toy down in front of the globe, then took it in both hands and gave it a frame-shaking spin. Through his magnified lenses, he peered into thousands of homes, and when it finally came to a stop, he took those lenses off, set them in front of the Toy, and nudged it forward. It put its plastic face against it and looked through.

What it saw was this: four walls, a ceiling, and a floor.

A room. A home. A world of its own, not too different than the workshop. Only, instead of being surrounded by the cosmos, it had a white-picket fence. Past that, and through a door with chipped paint, up a set of creaking stairs, into another room, sat a little girl. She looked no older than four and didn’t have much of anything at all. A coloring book, and a bed with no boxspring, and a mess of curly, stained hair. She wore dirty-shoes, had dirt on her shirt too, and looked lonelier than the last puppy of a litter.

The Talking Toy jolted backward when the Assembled Man said: “This is Sandra.”

“Sandra…” it said.

“She’s missing someone too. Dearly. The difference between her and us, though? She doesn’t have any memories to cherish—she lost her mama just after being born.”

The Talking Toy’s eyes were glued to the lenses.

“I believe that having someone to talk to, someone who can make her smile and giggle, is what she needs more than anything.”

The Talking Toy looked at the Assembled Man. The answer was written on its face. Still, he needed to hear him say it.

“So, answer me this, Talking Toy—do you want to stay here and lament the loss of the Boy…

“…or use those precious times you spent with him, the smiles, the giggles, to make Sandra smile and giggle?”

“I…I want to move on!” it shouted. “I want to become Sandra’s best friend!”

“Then, you shall.”

THE END

afterward

I swear, I’ve started writing this too many times to count. I have notebooks full of scratched out thoughts, feelings, and memories, some stitched together with a little bit of make-believe sprinkled in, others clear as if I were still right there, living them.

Because this is the first thing in my life that I have no clue how to write. Hell, if I’m being honest, I don’t even know if I should write it. Maybe some things we’re going through, we’re meant to keep inside. But I don’t know how to do that. I can’t. If I’m going through something, it bleeds into my writing. It’s how I explore, and explain, who I am. So, fuck it. I’m just going to write.

One month ago, five days shy of Christmas, I lost someone dearly important to me. A woman who raised three generations—my mother, my sister, me, and my niece—and taught us all how to smile, even when shit was at its worst.

My aunt. ‘Burbur’, I called her.

I didn’t get to say goodbye to her. I’ll never get to say ‘I love you’ to her again. The last time I said anything to her, I was calling her the day after her birthday, apologizing because I’d missed it. ‘I’m just so busy with work,’ I said. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ she said. The last time I saw her was a year ago, which was a year after the last time I’d seen her before that. I went back to Maryland to visit my family, and she and I sat and talked. A lot. Not enough. She loved my dog, Porkchop. We laughed as he tried squeezing under her bed, wanting desperately to get the cat hiding underneath it.

We laughed just like we’d used to when I’d get home from school and we’d watch TV. I remember showing her Kill la Kill and she had no idea was going on but she hooted and hollered like she did. We laughed like when I was real little and she’d take me to work and I’d put all her rubber thimbles on my fingers, pretend I was an alien, and beg for a dollar to get a candy-bar from the vending machine.

It started with a phone-call. ‘Heart-attack.’ Then, an hour later, a second one—“She’s dead.”

A few hours before, I’d been on stream, eating hot-sauces with my best friend, sobbing because the heat was too much for him. Now I was sitting on my bathroom floor, sobbing she was dead. Dead. Gone. Not coming back.

Sobbing like I did after my first day of middle-school, when I learned it was time to grow up and didn’t wanna. Sobbing like that time I got a splinter in my toe and it bled, and bled, and bled. Sobbing like I when watched that Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror episode with Hugo, Bart’s secret brother, and cowered in bed all night, gripping the blankets like he was going to get me next.

One of my earliest memories is a dream. It’s faded now, worn-down by the years, but I must have been three or four, because I was still in Baltimore City, in the row-home I grew up in. All I remember is that, in this dream, I was lost. I think it was in a castle. I vaguely remember ice? It might have been made of ice. Anyway, I was lost, wandering around, looking for Burbur, calling her name and, as I often did, sobbing. I remember that, just before I woke up, she found me, and hugged me, and when I did wake up, I hugged her, told her I loved her, and explained the whole thing to her like it was real.

Now, in a way, I’m back there, in that dream, lost all over again. The difference is, this time I won’t find her, and I know I won’t, and I won’t wake up, and I won’t hug her, and I won’t be able to tell her that I love her. But I know what she’d say if she was here, because it’s what she’d say anytime she got bad news. She’d say: ‘That’s okay.’

When you’ve known someone since birth, losing them is like losing a piece of yourself. They’ve been part of your entire life, your normal, and so existing without them seems impossible. In the last two years, I’ve lost my grandmother, my childhood dog, and now Burbur. I could dwell on that and let it destroy me, and some days, truth-be-told, it does. But they wouldn’t want that.

They’d want me to smile. To live life and chase my dreams. To keep traveling the world and making things I’m proud of. So I will.

Life doesn’t go on forever, and know what? ‘That’s okay.’ People live through their legacy, and though Burbur is gone, she gave me twenty-seven years of love, lessons, and memories that I’m going to pass on to everyone around me. My future children won’t ever meet her and that’s a thought that hurts, but through me, she’ll live on, and through the people around me, I’ll live on. Death is a tragedy, of course. But living, and having lived, is a beautiful thing.

Today, we get her ashes back. And I know it’s going to be a rough one. I’m going to cry, and miss her, and feel broken. But one day, I won’t. One day, I’ll relive all time we spent together with a smile, passing these cherished moments on, and living to create new ones with new people, passing on that same love she gave me.

I love you, Burbur. And I miss you. And I will live, and embrace each day with a smile, for you. I might be entering a new chapter in my life, I might finally be growing up even though I still don’t wanna, but I know what you’d say.

‘That’s okay.’ And one day, somehow, I truly believe it will be.