Queen here. This post is about how to handle your Holder, in case any other anthropomorphic toys happen on this website. A Holder, if you didn’t know, is a person who owns a toy. Specifically one they have endowed with personality, clothing, housing, etc. Like us villagers. Our Holder is creating an entire living universe for us, so we respond by being alive. You may be one of those humans who thinks this is pure fantasy, but have you ever watched Toy Story? Just so you know, it’s Real. I mean, they disguised it as entertainment, but believe you me, it’s real.
So anyway, handling a Holder. We are held by a person who takes care of her toys. You’re lucky if you’ve got that. Sure, you might spend some time in a cupboard on display (which is better than residing a drawer, by the way) but you don’t have to worry about your fuzz wearing off by being handled so much, and you get assigned roles, and have housing, and all that fun stuff.
But enough about us. Let me tell you how to influence your Holder. I mean, more than just being cute and smiling all the time, though that helps. I mean really influence.
So the other day, as we were getting ready to do more photographs of the village, we realized there were some things missing. We’re very inventive, for toys, but even we can’t do some things. So I enlisted the aid of the cats. We have a lot of cats. They have their own apartment building, which will probably have to be the next thing we photograph, because it’s complete. So I got the cats, and the King, of course, and a good share of the city guard (mostly my relatives, but there’s nothing wrong with nepotism in my kingdom). There was a bit of squawking, or meowing, but we got them all lined up the way we wanted, and off we marched to our Holder’s bedroom. It’s on the same floor as the room the village is in, so it was easy so far. Our first hurdle was the door knob. Our Holder sleeps with her door closed because the cat – the real cat – won’t let her sleep if she doesn’t lock her out. Which brings me to our next hurdle, which was the cat. The real cat.
Now, when it comes to playing inanimate, we toys are exempted when it comes to animals, though it is a sad truth than many toys have come to a gummy end after encountering the family dog. Sigh. Cats don’t usually chew, but they do bat, and sometimes bite. This cat, I’ll call her Malevola, was very interested to see a troop of toys marching across the room. She watched from the seat of a chair for a few minutes, so quiet that we hoped she’d gone to hide somewhere else in the house. And she’s all black, so she blends in with the chair upholstery. She was just waiting to strike.
If you don’t think bears fly, you should have been there. The floor we were trooping across happens to belong to the craft room. All the guard, plus the king ended up in a bin of fabric scraps, while the rest of us scurried under the table among the tubs of stuff. If you’ve ever been Held by a crafter, you know exactly what I mean by ‘stuff’. The ones in the fabric bin were okay, and kept shouting encouragement to us, but we who were under the table had to scramble around to find hiding places. Let me tell you about glitter. There were shoals of it under there, along with lost jewelry parts, dried up glue sticks, beads and marbles and other things that roll, an extra sewing machine, and a box full of – you guessed it – empty boxes. So for half the night, we were sneaking around looking for a way past the cat.
Meanwhile, the King girded up his loins and got the guard and the cats who were with him out of the bin and over to the door, where they made a critter-ladder to the door knob. And I don’t know why the cats complained so much about it. It just makes sense that the King should be on the top.
At this point you’ve probably found the flaw in our logic. If we open the door to her room, won’t the cat go in and wake her up? And what would she say when she found all of us scattered around the floor in the craft room? It was up to us – the ones under the table – to distract the cat long enough for the King to go in and deliver our message to our Holder.
If you’ve ever tried to order cats around, you know how hard the next part was. You’d think they’d feel some kind of kinship with Malevola, both being felines. They didn’t see it that way. Only threatening them with the dungeon and the confiscation of their catnip supply had any effect on them. But Mr.Calico got brave, and leapt out in the open (by this time we were all hiding inside the cover of the extra sewing machine. One thing about being toys, Malevola couldn’t hunt us by scent) screaming “Jigga Jigga Jigga!” I don’t know what this was supposed to mean, but remember, we were made in China, so don’t expect a lot of vocabulary.
Malevola reacted immediately. Mr. Calico ducked into the crack next to the little drinks fridge our Holder keeps, and Malevola followed. She can get her paw about halfway into the crack, so Mr. Calico had to go way to the back where the dust-bunnies are kept (we have no relationship with dust bunnies. Don’t expect them to come into this narrative). Malevola spent a couple of minutes trying to get him out, which was long enough for the King to get the door knob turned. We knew we had to have another distraction. This time it was Ms. Tabby-cat, our school teacher. She went flying out of cover on a glue stick. Rolled it just like a lumberjack on a floating log. Went skittering out, and headed the other way, toward the sink. Malevola pounced, but Ms. Tabby-cat got into the crack between the computer cpu and the file cabinet. Malevola went around to the back side of the computer, where all the wires and (again) more dust bunnies are kept, so Ms. Tabby-cat moved back toward the front. She kept this up, moving back and forth as the cat scrambled around, while the King got the door closed to a crack that we hoped Malevola wouldn’t notice.
I wasn’t there for the next part, but the King filled me in. The King and his minions made another ladder to the bed. Our Holder, thank goodness, sleeps soundly. I mean ‘soundly’, because she snores like a small steam engine when her cpap mask isn’t fitting right. But anyway, the King got up next to her ear and told her: “You forgot to put scrap metal at the blacksmith shop. Find some scrap metal for the blacksmith. And the Castle’s post office doesn’t have anything in it yet. You’ve got to finish the post office. And you need to get the dust bunnies from behind your fridge and computer.” That was the message we’d agreed upon. Except for the dust bunnies. He added that on his own.
Malevola was still alternately attacking both sides of the computer when they go to the crack in the door. It was time for our third distraction. I handled this one myself, because by that time I wasn’t sure the cats were being effective. I started shooting marbles out at Malevola, using a rubber band held by two cats. It worked perfectly, aside from the part where the two cats got slammed together after each launch. But they’re fine now, even if their whiskers got bent a little. Malevola was leaping all around the floor, searching for marbles. So I whispered over to the King to open the door further, so Malevola would go in there. Since we were done, I didn’t see anything wrong with waking our Holder. And beside that, Malevola would gain her sweetest desire, getting into the bedroom at night. I’m not completely plastic-hearted.
Have I told you that the King’s hearing isn’t what it used to be? I told him: “Open the door some more!”
He said: “You want me to make s’mores?”
“No! Get the door opened so the cat can come in!”
“You want me to become a catechumen?”
“I want you to open the door!”
“Wait just a second. After I open the door some more, I’ll come over where you are.”
Well, we did get the door open, and Malevola saw it, and abandoned her chase. We skedaddled for the village and all got in our places before the cat woke our Holder up. Most of us, anyway. The cats started fighting with one another over who got to climb the staircase first, so when our Holder wandered through and saw them still scattered on the floor, she got after Malevola. So that worked out perfectly.
That’s it for today. Remember to buy JZ’s books, or all this work will be for nothing.