Anna gazed at the statue in complete awe of every line, fascinated by the smooth flawlessness of every dip and slope. She admired the delicate hands of this ageless young woman, small and perfect down to the ragged nubs of her nails. A few strips of stone cloth, sultry and impossible for its texture and inkiness, wrapped her breasts and hips, affording her the dignity of modesty.
She walked around in silence, gazing at the smooth hollows behind the nameless girl's knees, the perfect forms of her ankles and toes, the exquisite frenzied splay of hair plastered to her ivory shoulders and back.
The statue, lifelike as it was, neither appreciated nor objected to the attention; she simply sat quietly on the pedestal, legs arranged loosely beneath her, her arms extended gracefully into empty space as though waiting for something to alight upon her.
The mechanics of this piece are astounding, Anna thought. The support structure is completely wrong and the balance is off. By rights, this statue should have collapsed beneath its own weight years ago. And...
She breathed in heavily, marveling once more at its seamless perfection.
It just wasn't possible.
Above the young woman, just beyond the reach of those all-too-alive hands hover the perfect effigy of an owl. It hung suspended in the air, without benefit of strings or wires or any support whatsoever from the statue's substantial base.
It simply floated, unassuming, in the dim gallery.
Anna shook her head, once again astounded by the feat of artistic engineering used to deliver the appearance of flight. She paused, her arm half extended. Mustn't touch, she reminded herself, although she felt an overwhelming urge to reach out and stroke the delicate pinfeathers, to sift the owl's downy breast. She dropped her eyes to the statue's base, concentrating on the words. The signage, etched in a plaque of burnished gold, read simply:
"The Owl Lover"
No background, no artist, no date. Only this.
The scene held a moment of unequivocal sadness; forever in flight, forever beyond her grasp, the owl took silent and stony wing to escape his heartsick follower's clutches. It reminded her of Bernini's Daphne and Apollo, the pursuer and the pursued, with love always just out of reach.
How many times had Anna seen this masterpiece, so stunning in its simplicity, yet fathomless as the dark seas of time itself? She always came back, drawn once again by the promise of an undiscovered detail; of a wrinkle or an expression she might have missed the last time. She was never disappointed. Today she discovered something new, some small bit of trivia others might dismiss as foolish or insignificant.
Tears, Tiny stone tear-tracks streaked the perfect alabaster whiteness of her cheeks.
The gallery was deserted today, except for the occasional security guard making his rounds every hour or so. Outside, the day had fallen into a sunset blue, still too beautiful to hole up in a windowless brick building filled with pieces of the long-dead past. No one in their right mind would have given up a perfectly good Friday night for the dim halls of a public art gallery.
No one but Anna, of course.
She couldn't stay home. Her presence alone enlisted her for babysitting duty, and she had much better things to do with her time than changing the twins' diapers and mixing formula. Anyway, that was their mother's job. It was just fine with Anna that Mom was too busy taking care of the rest of the family to notice how frequently she was gone these days. It saved Anna the trouble of explaining herself all the time.
She sat down on the hardwood floor and rested her head on the statue's base. A curious chill emanated from the stone, cooling her skin even from a foot away or more. She reached out to touch the statue's smooth white ankle, and again stopped herself.
She wasn't sure why she felt so drawn to this particular piece. It wasn't the most popular work of art in the museum, or the most beautiful. In fact, the curator's decision to keep it in this badly lit corner was based in part upon the public's request for more people-friendly works. More Anne Geddes, More Andrew Wyeth, More Norman Rockwell. The weeping lady and her owl lover didn't exactly fit the category of feel-good art.
Nonetheless, "The Owl Lover" blew them all out of the water. None of the works by those artists held half the curiosity, half the wonder and mystery of this single piece. Half its attraction, she supposed, was the mystery surrounding its acquisition. She had asked one of the curators about its purchase only to find an anonymous benefactor had donated it. Poking and prodding hadn't helped to get more information out of her, but the curator did mention that he was an older gentleman, continental to the core, whose health had failed rapidly in the past few years. He had simply wanted to see the prize of his collection housed where it might be appreciated rather than sold anonymously at some estate auction.
She could see where this might be the prize of his collection. Every inch was perfect, wrought in exquisite detail, right to the soul in those outstretched hands. The artist might have just poured liquid stone over the moment to seal it in, and then set it upon a base and called it 'art.'
A sweet, dark odor assailed her nostrils and she blinked her eyes, grown large in the dim, dusty light. A pleasant odor, and familiar...dusky, as though from flowers cultivated at night. It smelled like violets in late summer, the kind that used to spring up in the shade behind her Aunt Sarah's garage.
"It's like a little piece of forever, isn't it?"
Anna scrambled up quickly at the sound of the man's voice. She squinted in the dim light to see a thin, elderly man hobbling toward her, his slight weight pitched forward over a walker. He seemed spry enough, but she didn't doubt he needed that extra little bit of help to get around.
"Didn't mean to frighten you, my dear," he soothed, noting the startled flush in Anna's cheeks. "I'll leave if you'd like."
"N-no," Anna stuttered, embarrassed. "No, I was just-"
"Doesn't matter," the old man said, dismissing her explanation. He jerked his chin towards the statue. "She's beautiful, isn't she? That little girl in there's got some stories to tell. I've been listening for years."
"'She' is a statue," Anna snapped. Her heart still pounded at the shock of discovering she wasn't alone. "I doubt it has a whole lot to say."
He gave Anna a pitying smile. He didn't have so many furrows in his forehead, she noticed, as a long mottled scar that rippled when he smiled.
"Everything has a story, if you'll only hear it," he explained. "It won't be so obvious at first. You'll come back again and again - the way you keep coming back to this museum, for example..."
"How do you know that?" she demanded, eyeing him, then the door, cautiously.
He chuckled, dismissing the question. "You've fooled yourself into thinking it's the cleverness in the design or the beauty of the piece that brings you back, but it isn't. It's the stories. She won't let go of you until you've heard them all." The old man appreciated Anna bewilderment.
"Something in you knows they're there - that's why you keep coming back.
But you've never really listened for them, have you? You should, you know."
"And why should I?"
"Because insomnia is only one agent of unfinished business, He coughed dryly, still smiling as his face turned beet-purple. Anna winced at the rattle in his chest. It sounded like old bones tumbling around in a hollow gourd.
He looked up again, his eyes shining like pale, washed-out jewels. He looked as though he hadn't slept well for a very long time. He cast her sad, faded smile. "I'm older than dust and I still can't keep away."
"I thought you said it let go after you've heard what it has to say," Anna challenged.
"That's the curse of it. If you stayed here forever, you'd never hear it all."
He drifted in reminiscence, his eyes glittering like mad stones: "I heard them years ago, but it was a different time. A different place, they've been with me every moment since. That's how she came about, you know."
He reached out and touched a cold white fingertip, his hand trembling against the dead stone. He stared at his hands, blotchy and purple with age beneath the golden display lights. "There were stories, so many stories in my head, and I needed a face, lips, someone to tell them..."
The smell of violets rose up in a wave, and Anna's eyes watered painfully.
"SHHHH!" He turned to Anna, his hands white-knuckled and gripping the walker fiercely. "Can't you hear it? She's whispering now! Psssssst...pssssssst...oh can't you hear it?"
Anna stepped back until her knees were against the base. One more step and she'd be forced to sit down. Her eyes darted this way and that in search of an escape.
Calm down, Lee, she scolded herself. What's he goanna do? Chase you down and hit you with his walker?
"They follow me," he explained loudly, as though trying to make himself heard over another voice. "They won't let me be! They'll never just let me be..." His old face cracked with a look bordering on desperate. "You think I'm crazy, don't you? I can see it in your eyes. I'm old, but I'm certainly not blind!"
"I didn't say you were crazy," Anna protested. I didn't say you were sane either, she added silently, looking around, listening for a security guard.
He turned the walker around slowly, peering back at her with stony, desolate eyes. "Go ahead and listen," he dared. "Really listen. Listen to the air, to the dust motes swimming' around the lights, to the sound of your own breath. If you listen hard enough, you'll hear them too." He pitched over, propelling the walker forward and out the door. "Then we'll see who's crazy."
"Wait!" Anna called.
The old man stopped shakily, but didn't turn around.
"Where did you see it before? The statue, I mean." He dropped his head as his shoulders began to tremble. The reek of violets was almost overwhelming.
"Only a block of stone when I began, but she knew the shape she wanted to take!" The words tumbled down in a waterfall, stumbling and pouring like a secret kept too long. "The whispering, oh god the whispering...she wouldn't stop! She wouldn't let me forget her face! She knew what it would do to me to see her again, exactly as she was-"
"You...you made this?" Anna looked at his gnarled, twisted-root fingers.
Maybe once he could have created something like this, but she doubted he could hold a fork and spoon these days, much less a hammer and chisel.
"She's yours?"
Anna could almost hear the strange, bitter smile settle on his lips. "Oh yes, I made her," he confessed. "I made her into what she is now. But she never belonged to me," he added quickly. "Not even for a moment."
And then he was gone, the sound of his walker faded beyond the gallery walls.
Anna sat down near the statue's base, away from the door where no one could see her and raise questions as they walked by.
Stupid, she thought, but rested her head upon the base anyway and closed her eyes. The nearly inaudible hum of the overhead lights sliced the room's silence, but the statue itself remained still and mute, as she had known it would.
"It's like a little piece of forever, isn't it?"
She blocked out his trembling voice, and tried to find some comfort in the statue's cool stoicism and sense of always. She had not truly meant to fall asleep, but sleep she did, and heavily. When she dreamed, she dreamed of dark days and creatures that might never be again.
She forced open her eyes some time later to blurry, formless shapes and an unsettling sense of urgency. It was all she could do to keep her eyelids from snapping closed again. She felt dazed and weak, as though she'd come down with the flu, and when she tried to sit up, the room whirled around her, rising in a mammoth wave to overtake her.
No, it told her, and urged her to lower her head back down to the cool, white base. You're much better off right here.
The overhead lights snapped off, leaving only the dim golden glow of the display light for illumination. For the art's sake, no windows were present in the galleries. It might have been brightest noonday out, or the middle of the night.
She found she didn't much care.
Adding to this curious sense of enclosure, she could not hear a single sound outside her head - even the familiar tap-tap of the guards' footsteps was not to be heard.
...but whispering, whispering everywhere devoured the silence...