A chal­leng­ing task came one morn­ing when a box of mar­i­onettes ar­rived from Italy. Their strings were tan­gled to each other in a com­plex web. I grew frus­trated quickly, try­ing to find the ori­gins of the translu­cent lines. I picked up the bunch and hung them from the stor­age sup­ply racks in the back room. Ini­tially, I tried to focus on a sin­gle pup­pet, the one lo­cated at the cen­ter. As I un­rav­eled, un­knot­ted the string I no­ticed the tugs on the oth­ers. At times my at­tempts at un­wind­ing would tug sharply at one mar­i­onette and the oth­ers con­nected would shake and twist as a re­sult. I soon learned that the cen­ter mar­i­onette was re­spon­si­ble for the tan­gled mess. The knots and twists would take an­other hour to re­move, so I cut my losses and clipped the strings one by one. I held the cen­ter mar­i­onette as I snipped the lines em­a­nat­ing from its ap­pendages. The de­pen­dent mar­i­onettes would fling back when re­leased, jostling the oth­ers in the bunch be­fore they fell still and fi­nally freed. I cut the final lines, which stemmed from the cen­ter pup­pet’s scalp. With this, the torso, the legs, then the head clat­tered, slip­ping through my hands like sand through a sieve. The strings I had clipped were the very strings hold­ing the mar­i­onette to­gether. I col­lected the strings and ap­pendages. I cov­ered the de­tri­tus with some of the other trash and hoped the store man­ager wouldn’t no­tice.