The flesh in the furnace

can! I'm strong enough. Someone else could sit on the floor and push the brake and the accelerator whenever I told them to."
        "It might work," the third suitor said. He was the fair, shy, chubby one who in the play was stricken deaf and dumb by Wissa..
        Belina cast a harsh look at the chubby one. "And it might not. And if it doesn't and we've already killed the idiot, where are we?"
        "I agree with Belina," the winged puppet said.
        "Me too," said Wissa.
        "Yeah," agreed the first suitor.
        "She knows what she's doing, I guess," added the third suitor.
        That left only the prince and the second suitor who was presently on guard duty in the cab of the truck. Even if he chose to disagree with the blond star of their play, it would be five to two in her favor. And there was little likelihood that he would disagree with Bitty Belina.
        "Who ever made you the boss?" the prince wanted to know. He had his chin thrust out and his hand on the hilt of his sword.
        "Fate," she said.
        Wissa giggled.
        The prince blushed, turned to confront Belina more directly. "That's not a good enough answer for me. You're a woman. You're weak. I'm the strongest one here, with the most muscles. I was built that way, meant to be the leader."
        "You're getting reality confused with the script," Bitty Belina told him. She smiled sweetly, the very same smile she always gave him in the last act of their story, the smile from the script.
        "Besides," he said, ignoring her sarcasm, "I have the sword, the only weapon here."
        "Was that directed at me… or Sebastian?" she asked.
        "You figure it out," he said, looking to the others to see if they were, perhaps, having doubts about their original vows of allegiance to Bitty Belina.
        That was a mistake. He should have kept his eyes on the blond, his lover from the stage. The moment his gaze was elsewhere, she danced forward on her small toes, kicked upward, and delivered a solid blow between the prince's legs. He gagged, fell over, his sword useless now that he needed all his strength to get breath into his lungs.
        Wissa was laughing out loud now. She jumped up and embraced Belina, and while the prince watched, unable to move or defend his honor, the two women kissed. It was not the sort of kiss he liked to see them exchange. When he did see it, he understood that it was a challenge to his manhood, to the manhood of every one of the male puppets. The suitors and the winged angel didn't seem to care. But he had been given too much pride, and the sight of them together almost gave him the courage to plot their deaths.
        Almost.
        But there was always something in Bitty Belina's eyes that made him abandon such considerations before he carried them very far.
        
        The long hours behind the wheel gave Sebastian much time to think, and he let his mind range across the spectrum of his life, through black moments and light moments, through happiness and defeat, never following any single avenue of memory to its end. Mostly, he remembered small triumphs and tragedies. Indeed, he had had no large triumphs to speak of-and the tragedies on the scale of jenny and Pertos and Ben Samuels were too huge for his investigation.
        The land was endlessly white and the sky perpetually overcast. There was always falling snow, sometimes only a few flakes and other times impenetrable sheets that obscured the way and forced him to pull over and stop for the duration.
        He came to know the puppets as well as he could know anyone, and he had his favorites among them. He liked the angel very much, though they said little to each other. Even in the dim light of the northern winter, those golden wings glinted and shone. They reminded Sebastian of people he had loved, though he could no longer summon forward any name but Bitty Belina's to fit a golden image. He disliked the prince quite a bit. He was a snide, harshspeaking little fellow. He liked to tease Sebastian with the spiders, and when he had tired of that, he enjoyed jabbing his sword into the idoit's thigh and simultaneously warning him against losing control of the truck. Sebastian's leg was dotted with little gashes and tiny holes as large as the place where a nail might go in the hands of a martyr. He found that he liked Wissa, though that surprised him. She was the evil stepmother, and she should never be