Another morbid one based on Treehouse of Horror XXVI. Just a warning.
When Bob was a child, about seven years old if his memory was accurate, he'd gone through a puppetry phase. Little Cecil tended to cry at the sight of puppets, but Bob felt oddly drawn to them. He made rather small and rudimentary marionettes out of glue, Popsicle sticks, string, and sometimes pieces of cloth in an attempt to make clothes. He'd then move the puppet stick-figures around and make them recite Shakespearean soliloquies or sing Gilbert and Sullivan, or sometimes have them perform an entire play.
Bob's innocent childhood hobby took on a more grotesque, macabre form when he finally killed Bart Simpson. Following a week of endless frustration at the university, having failed to find a single student with a sincere interest in poetry and didn't need a laptop or smartphone to tell them what to think, Bob got himself drunk. He actually went through quite a few wine bottles before he reached that point. Robert Underdunk Terwilliger was made of tougher stuff than those pathetic, fat buffoons like Homer Simpson, who went to seedy bars to seek the company of other such people, and could get drunk after just two or three glasses. Bob couldn't quite understand how someone could be so lacking in dignity that they didn't care if others witnessed them drown their sorrows. Then again, as the saying went, "Misery loves company."
Bob's only company was the decaying corpse of a fourth grader. In his intoxicated state, Bob got the mad idea to attach strings to Bart's body and make him "walk" around, or do a floppy little dance. Then Bob told Bart about how aggravated and unfulfilled he felt in his new job, occasionally pretending Bart could reply. In between complaints, Bob would interject the occasional "Ay caramba" or "Don't have a cow" in a poor impersonation of a pre-adolescent boy's voice. Then Bob sat quietly and examined Bart's rotting, vacantly staring face.
What was it about plotting revenge on this little boy that appealed to Bob so much? Certainly he loathed Bart, but he'd also hated Krusty, and there were many others who had wronged him seriously enough to deserve his painful wrath. It was frustrating to have been outsmarted and had his life ruined by an obnoxious child who'd likely never even get accepted into a post-secondary institution of learning, let alone a low-quality one like Springfield University, but why had he devoted so much of his own life to taking away Bart's? It had cost him his sanity, opportunities to return to an honest life, and his wife and son.
Was Bob simply a cruel coward, deriving his only real joy from causing others to suffer and being unwilling to take on someone his own size? Was his life that devoid of a purpose? Was a ten-year-old archenemy his strongest connection to another human being, yet another human connection his vindictive nature had destroyed?
Removing the puppet strings from Bart, Bob reflected on the fact that he himself was an empty, lifeless object like a puppet, and the eternal lust for vengeance was his puppet-master. His students were puppets too, in a manner of thinking: mindless meat-puppets controlled by their precious technology.
Bob put Bart away, back behind the painting. He could no longer handle that awful blank stare affixed to the dead boy's face. He almost envied Bart, as the dead could no longer be tortured by their own thoughts.