She is waiting in stone. Some day I will pick up my chisel to carve and she will be inside instead. I do not know if it will be a joyous meeting; time has changed me since she knew me. But I have been promised that she is waiting.
When she left me all those years ago, when I begged them to make her mine again, I made no specifications as to how. And when the chisel was left at my doorstep, tangled in a strand of her hair, I knew the old ones were telling me what I needed to know. But not what I wanted to know. How, but not when.
I am an old man now, and yet perhaps I am not the changed one. Maybe she will emerge from the cold embrace of rock like a virgin from the foam, or maybe she will come back cold and hard as I have become. Maybe we're meant for each other.
Maybe the chisel was just a joke. Maybe she did what she said she would do and went to America to be an actress. Maybe she wound up a whore.
Maybe...
I cannot think those thoughts. So instead I choose another block, another mortuary statue to complete, and chip away, and think that this may be the day. She is waiting. I have been promised.
This isn't a terribly sexy picture and in many ways it's sort of frightening. The eyes are what really get me. But it was the first picture to pop up on the random spinner that said anything at all, so I used it. I didn't spin that many times either; there was an obvious one about BDSM, a really ugly one, and an illustration from a book, and then this one. The first I already did last week, the second I wasn't about to do, and the third had already been done by someone else and I wasn't interested in literary sloppy seconds.
I like the idea of a sort of reverse Pygmalion with a bit of whoever said that there was a sculpture hiding in every rock, and it merely needed finding. Something like that. I think, if you ask dark powers to bring your love back, you're likely to get something other than what you bargained for, and I think carving your love out of rock would probably wind up badly. So let's hope, for our narrator's sake, that he never actually finds her in a stone. Those eyes aren't mortal eyes anymore.
No FFF again this week, not that I think I would have had the time to do it had there been one. I hope everything's okay at FFF headquarters. But I decided to do one of these random ones instead, because it's good practice.
2 comments:
Fantastic piece. Just amazing. It reminds me of something from "The Twilight Zone" or "Night Gallery". You have such a gift for noire, I truly love your voice.
Bravo.
PS
A boy and girl fall in love though she is already married. The jealous husband kills his wife's lover, but she turns to a gypsy witch to bring her loved on back. After $$ is paid and incantations are offered, he returns, well, his body rises from the grave, but it is a month dead, and shows it.....
He is probably luck if he never finds her, perhaps she will be angry from having been encased in stone for so long, or perhaps she will dislike the form he has fashioned for her. Summoning the dead is risky business and the old ones know this.
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