Statues

Claire walked briskly through the autumn leaves.  She was dressed in an earthy way, free flowing skirts and jewelry.  Her hair was dark, curly, cut short, with a faint auburn cast from the light.
Her little girl lagged behind her mother, staring at the sidewalk and kicking leaves as she walked.  She wore a green jacket and jeans.  The small house they approached was surrounded by trees wildly tossing their autumn crowns in the wind.  She stopped walking suddenly and squatted down to observe the leaves floating in a puddle on the sidewalk.  Claire continued breezily up the sidewalk, unaware.
Hi mom” Claire said as the porch door squeaked open to reveal her mother’s frail frame. 
“Where’s my granddaughter?” Claire glanced behind her and saw that the girl was not at her heels.  A frown came over her face and she turned fully to see her daughter picking leaves from the puddle at the end of the sidewalk.  “Abby, stop that and get over here” she yelled.
The small girl didn’t budge from her spot.  Grass lilted into the puddle, blown by the winds. The muddled water was cool, cold. Her jacket was green, and the wind puffed it up again just as it pressed the grass over. Abby carefully put her sneakers, just the very toes, right to the edge and watched the water seep up as her rubber soles sank.  She tapped and patted the surface of the water to make ripples and waves. Only her shoe bottoms came up through the reflection, making it look like she was upside down, in the earth.  She broke the surface of the water with her fingers and patted around inside it, feeling for stones or rusty relics amidst the musty puddling leaves.
Still holding the screen door open in the wind, the elderly woman said “Let her stay outside awhile, so we can talk. Come in for some coffee.”  Claire collected herself.  She climbed the wooden steps to the porch and entered the house as leaves clattered on the sidewalk behind her, chasing her into the house. The kitchen was warm and inviting.
“Her nightmares are starting again.”  Claire stated flatly as she closed the door on the wind and leaves behind her.
“What are the nightmares about this time?”
“The same.  About some ghostly woman that creeps into her room at night and stares at her, that’s all I could get out of her.”  The grandmother handed Claire a steaming mug of coffee.  “She goes hysterical; I’ve never seen a child have such hysterics from a nightmare.  She really seems to believe there’s a ghost there.”
Claire sat down at the kitchen table with her coffee, gazing out the screen door at her daughter, who was still pulling colorful leaves from the puddle far down the driveway.  “I thought we could stay the night, and then maybe you could take her for a week.”
“You’re both welcome to stay the night” the grandmother said. “I’ve got the attic bedroom made up for Abby”.
Claire mused, still watching her daughter protectively from the kitchen window.  “I think she is becoming mentally ill.  She doesn’t talk much, except to herself, and always looks at the ground, obsessively collecting worthless things. 
“Sounds like normal children’s play to me.”
Undeterred, Claire placed her coffee on the table and got up to open the screen door and again summoned her daughter from the puddle.  “Sometimes she just freezes and poses and I can’t make her budge.  She won’t speak. Says she’s playing statue. How can you call that normal?”    What little girl can stay put for that long?”
At her mother’s second call Abby stood up and cast her last glance down at the ground.  Her ankles ached from squatting by the puddle where water swirled like thick milky tea, but she still hated leaving from the puddle, her shoes getting ripped from their reflected soles. She slowly turned to stare at the porch, hearing her mother’s call, and began walking slowly towards the house.  As she climbed the porch, she was ordered to empty her pockets which contained several wet leaves and stones.  She looked like she was about to cry as she watched the damp leaves fly away in the rushing wind.
“Come in here Abby, look here.” the grandmother coaxed the child inside.  From a box on the kitchen table she lifted a few frames holding pictures of somber looking people.”I brought these out for your mother to look at. These pictures are of your family, taken a long time ago.  See this little girl?” She handed a darrogotype to the child. That’s my grandmother as a child.” The little girl in the darrogotype stared through analgesic dust at nothing, leaning against the post of a gate.
Abby gripped the frame and shook it hard a few times, hoping to jostle the girl into movement. She just stood there like a corpse, oil-yellow and aging, holding her basket of flowers against the prop of the wooden gated fence like she had a stick for a spine. The picture didn't respond, didn't move, just smiled and stared sweetly through the ochre haze of time.
         “You can look at them, but don’t break anything. “  Leaning back and sighing, the grandmother said, “That’s the one who was mentally ill, Claire. My grandmother”.
Claire took the picture from her daughter and gazed at it.  She thought to herself how simple it would be to be back in the past- even if insane.  The photos held a romance for her.  They seemed to her to be mocking her with their easy privilege of death.  Look, aren’t we wonderful?  they seemed to say. Don't' you wish you were here, in this past we make. We listen for violins and crackly needles on phonographs, work white dresses on headless dummies on autumn afternoons before tea, our voices breaking and skipping in grand melodrama, we smell of old wood and antiques and lace all the time. We sit very still in these frames for you, so you can imagine us writing on brown paper in calligraphy, like no one writes anymore, flighted letters and poems while seated in rockers, brushing our long brown, beautiful hair with silver brushes and dreaming, our daughters waiting on us as we hold our round heavy bellies tenderly laden with child.
But Claire knew well enough not to get sentimental. 
She knew that nothing was sentimental anymore, not even insanity.  “Do you know much about her mental illness?”
“She was probably schizophrenic- heard voices, experienced catatonic stupors, acted strangely in general.  She also spent some time in an asylum.” 
“Now that’s why I’m worried about Abby-she acts strangely, and how do we know it’s not catatonic when she freezes. She may hear voices, I’m not sure, but she talks to herself all the time. “
Claire went through more pictures with her mother, asking about mental illness and strange habits of each ancestor, as Abby explored the contents of the box.  The people in the pictures looked unpleasant to Abby, sad, evil. Even though they were expired and had breathed their last musty breathes, they echoed and lived, possessing life in reality, posing and structured in ghostly movements. She took out several more pictures, and set several up around her on the floor.  They gazed out at her from the circle. There was even a ballerina. They stared collectively out through their dirty yellow glass prisons. The dark dusty colors that gathered deeply around the figures then faded and swirled away at the edges of the glass-lost, alone, isolated in sepia fogs, colorless. Their faces and bodies were set in stone, lips pressed tight to maintain expressions. 
“They had to stand stock still for an hour to get a picture back then, sounds like you’d be good at that” her grandmother said.  Abby smiled, and stood like the girl in the picture, stock still with a stick for a spine. “Don’t encourage her mom.”  Claire said. “Claire, I’m just trying to show you that she’s got an imagination, not a mental illness.  An only child is especially imaginative. “The two women sat in silence for a moment, watching the girl stand very still, then Claire gave in. “Ok, Abby, if you’ve emptied all your pockets we can go antique shopping and you can pick something normal out to collect.” 
“Yes, you two go out to the barn and antique shop for awhile, and I’ll fix dinner.”
The barn arched itself high above, the dim autumn light and swallows darting through, while below the crowded silent congregation of musty, aging relics sat motionless, possessions of those long dead, abandoned in death. Claire looked around to see vases and plate sets, trunks and cameos and glittering costume jewelry, pearl hat pins and dressmaker dummies.
Abby listened to the warm soulless cooing of the pigeons through the wind. They twitched and twisted their heads about and around and watched her with sharp orange eyes, occasionally beating the air loudly and descending loftily onto the antiques. She heard the wisping barn swallows plummet into graceful arcs. A pigeon thudded its way down through the tarnished sunbeams onto an armoire.
         “Mourning doves”, Claire corrected her daughter. “Calling them pigeons make them seem like rats.” Her mother saw and insisted upon the poetic in all things.
         
Lots of tiny strange figurines stood at child's-eye level, pressed back into little armies of people and animals and curiosities on the lower shelves of the antique furniture pieces that Claire combed through. Abby poured over the glass cases filled with figurines-dusty porcelain cats and pigs and bejeweled dogs made from green colored glass. There were also dolls with cloth bodies or porcelain arms and heads, disguising their attachments with ribald clothes, or just hanging limbs threaded onto torsos larking off at contoured odd angles. They looked to Abby like vacant skeletons the way they sat and stood stiff but falling apart, eyes dull yet shiny like buttons of dark light.
The stench of decade old manure and rotted hay smelled sweet, ghostly traces of animals not stabled there for years.  The only real animals Abby found were stuffed squirrels or weasels, their feet nailed to the board by amateur taxidermists or sadists, their moth-eaten jagged fur stretched over the hard, preserved bodies. Shiny glass eyes were kindly poked in to replace their decomposed ones.
“Outside”, Claire commanded, after watching her daughter petting the taxidermied squirrel standing stiff on its rotted wood base, one glassy eye missing from the mangy corpse.
         Outside the peeping creaking and chirping by the puddling creek grew into a delicate chorus. Abby could smell the water and wood soaked with rain-rot, a warm friendly smell. Outside the barn there were old phone pole glass bell caps, a beautiful thick blue. There were Coke bottles from the 40's, defunct neon signs, their pull cords rotted off. Broken statuary tipped and leaned against the fencing and defunct farm machinery, the iron bed frames and bathtubs. Chrome bumpers and rusted washtubs were scattered around the grounds, choked by the tall grass. A concrete lawn angel with outstretched arms and a broken wing studied the girl as Abby stared the cupid down in its stony serenity. Beneath the statue, in the grass and leaves, she saw a dead sparrow.
She knelt down and picked it up gently, rolling it onto her palm. The tiny thing's head lolled back from its soft downy body. Its neck had been broken.
She cradled it in her hand and stroked the creature lovingly, as if it was a spectacular jay or cardinal. Abby felt her face crumple with sorrow and grief as she gazed upon and petted the lifeless sparrow's tiny body. Looking quickly around for observers, she carefully placed its limp form in her jacket pocket, and then resumed gazing and patting the cool earth for treasures, at the foot of the statue, until her mother was done antiquing. 
When her mother finally decided on an old secretary desk, she let Abby pick out a collectable piece from the barn.  Abby wanted the marble-eyed weasel, but Claire discouraged dead animals in her home, so she took instead a tiny glass cat and the bird secretly tucked away in her pocket.
When they pulled up to the driveway the little house was fully lit, looking warm and inviting.  As they walked up the porch the smell of dinner met them.  Abby hopped up on a stool and sat expectantly, patiently awaiting her dinner.  All three ate silently, thoughtfully. 
After dinner that night, her grandmother took Abby to sleep in the attic. It was wooden floored with a small window at either end, each framed with dirty lace panels. Half of the attic was piled with boxes filled with toys and books and papers. In one corner was a cast iron daybed with worn mattress and box springs. Her grandmother helped make the bed and tucked her in. “I’m going to turn the light off, Abby.  I’ll keep the door cracked. Good night.”  Abby could hear her mother and grandmother’s voices float up from the kitchen as she drifted off to sleep.
Late, late at night, Abby woke up because something was moving and shuffling in her attic room. It was very dark; the others had gone to bed, because the light was no longer coming though the crack under the door, no more warm voices tumbling up from the kitchen.
A woman was crawling towards her bed on her hands and knees, like an animal, like a snake or spider, creeping. Abby could see her staring at her, and that she knew she was awake and had caught her. She could tell because she was smiling. She seemed to be playing a game, but Abby was scared. Because she had come creeping into her room like a soundless spider.
         The worst thing was that the woman always smiled at Abby even when she didn’t know she was awake. Her face didn't change at all when Abby moved, or tried to talk to her to ask why she was doing this, or get her to say something, or yell at her to get away. She just kept smiling and sneaking closer. “Go away go away. What are you doing? Why are you acting this way? Please leave me alone.”  Abby’s hysteria grew as she met only silence and the hard glassy eyes of the grinning woman. Her voice frightened her as its pitch rose, and soon she saw only blackness and heard herself screaming as if far away- help me help me help me. She felt no more fear then, and listened to her voice and stared at the blackness, vaguely aware that her legs and arms were flailing and kicking.
She regained consciousness in her grandmother’s arms holding her tight. Her grandmother had come and turned the lights on to somehow chase the woman away.  She comforted Abby, leaving the lights on.  “Ghosts”, she mumbled.  “There are no ghosts.” Still, she taught the girl how to lock the attic room from the inside before she left the room.
The next morning she went to wake Claire who was nowhere to be found, until she glanced out the window into the front yard and gasped in alarm.  “Not again, not again” she moaned as she picked up the phone.  Abby descended from her attic room and heard the word “catatonic” just as her grandmother hung up the phone.  “Where’s mommy” she said.  “Outside” her grandmother answered as she ran to grab a blanket and rushed out onto the porch. “It’s happening again” she muttered to herself.
Abby looked out the window and saw her mother, naked under the shuttling clouds, standing very still on the morning lawn with arms outstretched to the stark branches of the treetops.  Her face was serene, yet fixed, like the people in the photographs, staring up to the gray sky.  Abby watched from the window, watched her mother frozen to the lawn, looking like she was summoning birds to her waiting arms.  Her grandmother seemed to be trying to get Claire to respond, trying gently to lower her reaching arms, and to wrap the blanket around her daughter’s nude, cold body. The approaching sirens screamed in the distance.  Abby descended the porch, put her hand in her jacket pocket and placed the bird’s corpse at the feet of her mother, and stood there, still as a mouse, until the ambulance took her mother away. 
The End