SELECTIONS from the MOPPETRY

by Sarah Dzida

Forword

 

In a story, it is never asked, who is the moppet?  Other tales have shavings coaxed into beauty, arisen on foam, clad in a porcelain nudity and sheltered by tender winds, not shunted into the wild.  But the moppet knows better. She's way beyond that long ago where pen, ink, and a scribble dropped her upon the stage, this page, just new.  It's a literary world here, the moppet would tell a kindred soul, and she'd say not to show any teeth, or exhale an extra sound, because vain words hated the excess.  She would add that details came unexpected always and plucked at her stitched limbs while themes, desirous to crossover into other chapters, always hungered for a loose thread.  They're all just egotists, the moppet to another, would say, words and swaggers, cursives and flourishes, thoughtless - languages.  They always had to be Right.  But the moppet knew how little they all stood on, just above a line, precarious and slender, how far they would fall when their meanings, truly unstable, crumbled inwards.

 

Drama

 

In this story about the moppet, her page had endured too many commas.  They were pinned up everywhere, especially where unwanted.  They dangled legs.  They enticed gap-toothed spaces with their slanted and fishy attention.  And those empty goblets swelled as if filled with a star dropped down by a well-wisher.  The moppet doubted the commas granted anything so luminous.  And the words thought so too.  They all grr-ed and grumbled over the slash, those commas, because they were an emphasis for blank, forgettable, plummets.  Things like this made the moppet`s world go haywire.  Filled it with the chatty catty comments of criticism, complaint and consonance. Didn`t the spaces see how commas cut inky ribbons?  Induced hiccups?  Punctuated smooth sheets?  They broke breath!  Made everyone gasp!  These things cornered the moppet, made her cringe at the click and clack of a mechanism gone corroded. It threw off the cartography of a not-blank page.  Made linear tectonic plates choppy, capitals feel underused and spaces smirk with their pretensions to be noticed.  The moppet had had enough.  Over letters and an unsolicited comma, she skipped past to give notice to a suddenly un-vacant space, which clogged and caused the whole machine to jolt-Tilt-jerk off axis and scatter away.

 

Candid

 

Listen!  Let's return back to the basics of moppetry: What makes up the moppet but a whimsy of gods or beings that create and desecrate sensuous sounds, delectable kisses, Malay cuisine, the glass walls of the Kyoto train station and our moppet… Such a darling poppet. Give a kiss and a kick to the poor thing in her situation on this vast canvas of indices. Technically, she stands after "mopish," which disappoints because it is vague like herself, and after "mop up," which will wipe away any imprecision that might occur in GREAT CATEGORIES - STEPS - IDEAS - THINGS! "She chewed, swallowed, digested and excreted. The end." Then, suddenly! - Our moppet laughs a vomitous sound that is not ugly because it is expelled and lost, once owned and no longer hers - like words. But did it all start in her body or in her mind? Where was the catalyst? What was the (in)voluntary power (oh gods!) that caused her to leave this mass of language at our door?