Putty and the Paper Figure Emi Noguchi (bio) In a former ghost town in the desert there was a person made of kneaded eraser who lived and worked in the art room at the community school. Among the century-old buildings lining the cobbled street, the community school was well respected: a place for neighbors of all ages to gather and express themselves. Putty was the finest member of the cleaning staff in recent memory, for she used the tackiness of her flesh to roll up the detritus abandoned by each class. A little bit lonely in disposition, Putty found great satisfaction in gathering up all the paper scraps and glue-hardened yarn that fell from the town’s imaginations. What strange inner worlds she had access to! The little bits cropped or torn or deemed unfinishable. She collected the students’ unwanted works and reused them to wallpaper her little cubby, layer after layer, until she felt cocooned by vulnerability, sincerity, and effort. At the end of a long night, Putty was often too tired to go out for karaoke at the old theater, or to a friend’s for a few hours of stories and food and drink. Instead, she usually asked someone in the community school’s live-work exchange program to roll her out in the pottery studio. Flattened thus, she could more easily extract the day’s flotsam. Cut felt; brittle drips of paint. As many jobs do, Putty’s work left its mark upon her, little scars adding up in her flesh. How long until she was more town than herself? Just before sleep, she would switch off the headlamp that glowed pink in her cubby and count her breaths, tracing in her memory the wiggly silhouette of a vase just above her head. No one but Putty demanded such thorough work from her. Perhaps she didn’t feel she deserved the kind of leisure her coworkers enjoyed. Perhaps, Putty thought, she didn’t love herself because whoever made her forgot to include it in her design. And who was that person, her maker? Putty believed she’d been created by the witch who lived with an old cat at the top of the town’s winding stairs. There, beyond the [End Page 44] final steps, sun-bleached fence posts marked the dotted line between the town and the dark, wild mountains above. The witch and the old cat were disinterested in weaving their lives into the fabric of the town. Instead, they lived on the outskirts. Around their little house crept lizards they’d made out of grass and sap, miniature jackrabbits built from the springs of mechanical pencils and ballpoint pens. In the witch’s garden, a skeleton puttered about, filled with crocheted muscles, sinews, organs, and nerves. Occasionally, a little jackrabbit would launch itself indoors to have a look around. The house was dark and filled with old things. In the kitchen: forest-green cabinets and a discolored arch of oil over the iron stove. Stiff wooden chairs and a table made from an old door. Around the hearth: two cushioned chairs on which the witch and the old cat rested when the nights grew chilly. On the far side of the house was a screened-in porch where the old cat spent hours sunning itself. A dark, wooden hallway built of fragrant wood extended out from the house to a dark, wooden toilet. Seated there, a person could peep out from a little window at the cactus brush. To Putty, the house was a fearsome place. She had never visited it, of course, but her morning walks brought her closer and closer, as though the witch’s house exerted a kind of magnetic pull and deep inside Putty was some iron core that drew her to the spot. ________ One day, the witch and the old cat were eating breakfast—a wild rice gruel with roasted chiles and oregano—when the witch said, “We really should do something with that old notebook.” In the breakfast nook, atop a stack of reference texts, was an old, weathered notebook. It was leatherbound, and its pages had been filled long before the witch...
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Oct 31, 2024
Sergey V Gorokhov 
Open Access