Hypnovember 2026 – Day 12

We’re entering this challenge for the first time, using the list below as a reference to write a series of flash fiction pieces. Come along on this journey, and let’s continue to have fun.

You can thank https://x.com/Skronos_ for creating such a detailed selection of deliciously kinky concepts to work with.

Day 12 – Lap Dog (Puppet)

For twenty years, the Thursday matinee at the Starlite Theatre in Branson had belonged to Lola Briggs and Rusty.

Rusty was a ventriloquist’s dummy with red yarn hair and a voice like a carnival barker. Lola was sixty-three, with silver curls and rhinestone glasses, and she had never once moved her lips onstage.

The Thursday crowd was mostly tour buses: retirees from Iowa and Arkansas who laughed at every joke and bought signed photos afterward. Lola loved them. She did not love Wade Hollis.

Wade had started coming in the spring. He sat in the third row with a bucket of popcorn and his arms crossed, and somewhere in the first ten minutes he would shout something. “I can see your throat moving!” or “Rusty’s funnier than you, and he’s made of wood!” Once, during her tribute to her late husband, he had yelled, “Bring back the dead guy!” The theater manager had asked him to leave twice. Both times, Wade bought a ticket for the following week.

Lola’s late husband, Earl, had been a stage hypnotist before they teamed up. He used to say that ventriloquism and hypnosis were the same trick done from different ends: one put a voice where it didn’t belong, and the other took a mind out of where it did. He had taught her both. She had only ever performed one.

She had never needed the other. Hecklers usually ran out of steam by their second visit, and the few who didn’t could be handled with a good comeback. Wade was different. Two weeks earlier, a woman from a church group in Joplin had left at intermission in tears after he mocked her laugh, and Lola had gone home that night, taken Earl’s old notebook down from the closet shelf, and read it cover to cover.
On the second Thursday in November, Wade shouted, “This act’s older than my grandma!” and the audience groaned.

Lola smiled at him. “Sir, you’ve been coming to see me every week for six months. I’m starting to think you like me.”

The crowd laughed. Wade’s face went red.

“Why don’t you come up here and show me how it’s done?”

The applause made it impossible for him to refuse. He climbed the steps, still holding his popcorn. Lola set Rusty on a stool, patted her knee, and said, “Have a seat, honey. Rusty doesn’t mind sharing.”

The audience roared. Wade hesitated, then perched awkwardly on her knee, a grown man in a camo jacket with his boots dangling. Lola put one hand flat on his back, exactly where she held Rusty, and let the other rest lightly at the base of his neck.

“Now look at Rusty,” she said, quietly enough that only he could hear. “Look at his eyes.”

Rusty’s glass eyes were blue and very still. Earl had chosen them. Lola tapped a slow rhythm on Wade’s back with two fingers, the same tempo she used to make Rusty’s head turn, and she talked to him under the laughter, low and steady, never moving her lips. She told him how heavy his jaw was. She told him how good it would feel to let someone else do the talking for once.

His jaw went slack. His eyes glazed.

“Say hello to the folks, Wade,” Lola said aloud.

Wade’s mouth dropped open and closed in a perfect, jerky rhythm, and out came a voice, high and nasal and absolutely not his: “Howdy, folks! Sorry about the popcorn!”

The audience screamed. A woman in the front row laughed so hard she had to be helped to the restroom.

Lola did fifteen minutes with him. Wade turned his head stiffly toward the audience and, in a squeaky voice, apologized for every Thursday since April. Then he sang “Tennessee Waltz” while Lola drank a full glass of water. When she finally tapped his back twice and whispered to him to wake up, he blinked at the standing ovation as if he’d just walked out of a movie theater into daylight.

“What happened?” he asked, in his own voice.

“You were wonderful,” Lola told him. “Same time next week.”

He came back the next Thursday. He didn’t heckle. He sat in the third row with his hands in his lap until she called him up, and then he climbed onstage and sat on her knee before she had to ask.

The theater manager added a second show, then a third. “Lola and Wade” went up on the marquee in red letters, and the tour buses started booking months in advance. Nobody could work out how she did it. A local magician bought front-row seats four weeks running and left each time shaking his head.

Rusty sits on a shelf in Lola’s dressing room now, beside a framed photo of Earl. She dusts him every Thursday before the show and tells him about the crowd, the way she used to tell Earl.

Wade’s wife came backstage one afternoon in January. She was a small, tired-looking woman in a church sweater, and she held Lola’s hands for a long time.

“I don’t know what you did,” she said. “He’s so polite now. He hasn’t yelled at a ballgame since October.”

Lola patted her hands. “Some men just need someone else to do the talking.”

Out in the hallway, Wade waited by the stage door with his hands folded and his jaw already loose, ready for the two o’clock show.