I want to be a good person. Lots of people realize that they do too, I think, when they have to live as adults for the first time. They see people with less than them and they have a realization that the main thing they want in life isn’t necessarily to be rich or successful, but to be good. I don’t think my mum’s decision to not drink human blood, and to raise me so I didn’t either, comes from a desire to be good, though. It has always been an expression of her lack of self-worth. She always said that she didn’t deserve things; she didn’t deserve to feel satiated, to try the blood of a nobler animal than the pig, such as the horse, even the cow; she didn’t deserve happiness; she didn’t deserve me either, and I in turn didn’t deserve the horse or cow or happiness because of what was in me that she had passed down from her body to mine. “We shouldn’t ever give the devil more than enough to survive,” she once said. “And that is what the demon in us is. We eat only to keep the human alive,” she said, because to deny the human side sustenance was to commit it to death, and that would be a worse sin than our continued existence was. I want to be good, though. I don’t know for sure where this desire comes from—perhaps from my dad, whose life and person must be preserved somewhere inside me.

The puppet I took yesterday is on my hand. I know it wasn’t good to take her. But, now she is in my studio, I feel at peace and content in this space; I feel less alone. Last night, I tried to google her, in case she is valuable or the work of a famous artist, in which case I suppose I’ll probably have to return her. But it was difficult to really know what to search for. I looked up “woman puppet with dark wooden head” and there were nearly twenty million results. I reverse-image-searched her too, but the technology can’t be that advanced since the puppets it brought up all looked completely different from her; most were puppets of men and most were carved from a light pine, or just had beige plastic heads like the queen, king, and devil back at the gallery. I gave up my search at some point in the early morning, put on an episode of Buffy, and fell asleep with the puppet on my hand and lying across my stomach, her little beady eyes open.