In the blackout, sounds of chopping and sawing, then lights up on Hans making the box an inch (or so) smaller, as Marjory, or the Narrator, recites her new story, possibly through a megaphone.
Marjory / Narrator He grew up in a church basement in Tennessee and he didn’t get along well with his seven older brothers. They would beat and bully him about how much he loved the gentle words of Jesus that’d filter down through the church’s floorboards and fill his rebel heart with peace and love and all that type of stuff. But then this one day, boy, he went and did it! He set free all the little bugs and tiny creatures his brothers had caught in their traps down there, like he thought Jesus would’ve if He lived down there and cared about bugs. But when his brothers found out, oh boy was that the final straw! So they caught him and they held him up by his eight little arms and they nailed them to a block of wood, and they left him to die down there. And he died down there …
Marjory takes out the spider marionette from behind her back, makes it flutter gently …
But his soul didn’t die. His soul rose up; it rose up past the cobwebs, past the floorboards, past the priests and the congregation. It rose all the way up to Heaven, in fact. But the man at the gates said they didn’t let spiders into Heaven, cos ‘It’d just scare the little kids.’ And he floated back down. And he doesn’t know where he is now. He doesn’t know where he is. He just knows it’s very very very very dark.
Hans What was it I said before?
Marjory Upbeat?
Hans We’re getting somewhere now.
He gestures with a lazy thumb for her to get in the box. She indicates the spider puppet.
Marjory Can I keep this?
Hans I want to say no … so I’m going to say no.
He takes it from her. She gets into the box.
Puppet strings and pygmy necks … do … not … mix. As they say in Sweden.
He slides the glass up and locks her in. He gives the box a little push and it gently swings from side to side, as he moves away.
How’s your new little box? Cosy?
Marjory Feels like more than a fucking inch.
Hans It could be two, I’m not very good at measuring, but maybe it’ll concentrate your mind on something a little more upbeat. Brand new mantra, Marjory – Upbeat, yes. Crucified spiders who can’t get into Heaven, less so.
He turns the box so the glass side faces away from us, the circular hole to us. He takes out a long string of sausages from inside his jacket.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I’m, uh, going on a little trip to England. For a couple of weeks.
Marjory’s eye appears at the hole.
Marjory For a couple of weeks?
Hans This Charles Darwin invite …
Hans This Charles Dickens invite. But I’ve got you fourteen sausages, one for every evening I’m away. Fingers crossed the boat don’t sink or we’ll both be fucked! Don’t stuff yourself!
He hands her one end of the string of sausages, letting the rest hang limp across the floor. He exits, and we hear the sound of him locking the attic door and his footsteps away downstairs. We see Marjory’s eye and hand holding on to the sausages through the hole for a moment. Then she tosses them away and on to the floor, out of reach. Her eye backs away from the hole and disappears in the darkness there.
Blackout.