AUSTIN’S STATUE
There is an old estate in the suburbs of Philadelphia tucked behind swells of long grassed hills and thick charming woods. Washington fences cut grassy fields into square shapes to keep cows and horses from wandering for miles. Estates like these were the country homes of the wealthiest Americans back when America was an infant and Philadelphia was its nursery. The estates are still used, some have been turned into preparatory schools some are the homes of the very wealthy and some are abandoned to the growth around them. The tracks of land that they sit on are still very large. The counties have zoning rules that protect this area of Southeastern Pennsylvania from being over developed.
Austin is a young boy from Florida who moved to the area recently. His mother is tall, long nosed, sandy blond hair, and tan skin. Her attractiveness is inflated by how she does not look like a typical Philadelphian mother. Her posture is a little funny. Her shoulders slink forward. Austin inherited her complexion and hair. His face is going through a goofy phase and his teeth are crooked. Puberty has started and its goal is a man taller and straighter than his mother. Austin’s father still lives in Florida, and his step dad is from Pennsylvania.
In the first year in his new home Austin went with the tide of adjustment and routine; new school, new friends, new weather, new life.
In the second year Austin did things that he chose. On one Saturday afternoon he trekked into the woods around his stepfather’s house. These deeper woods were pretty and new to him, he had never seen these trees before. He had never seen the fight between vines and saplings for space at the top. At the floor of the woods, the leaves and twigs decompose making the ground soft. The leaves absorb sound and wind making everything still and quiet like a sound booth in a recording studio. As if the woods had a natural “indoors”. Relaxed, he wandered without direction.
Amidst the untouched soft floor a space between the trees looks like it might have been an old path. To be sure, Austin followed his discovery and decided it was indeed a path one that had not been treaded upon in years but had nonetheless held its form. He walked the path.
He did not know it, but he entered the boundary lines of an old estate. The mansion was far off and could not be seen. The path became clearer and the woods became thinner. The path straightened and a short stone wall bordered the right side. To Austin, this was a cool discovery, the wall is intentional, it’s going to lead somewhere. He followed the wall and followed the wall. It made a sharp turn left and went up stone steps. It turned right and opened to a square of grass surrounded evenly by a five foot high stone wall. This is part of a garden. Now this was a discovery, like a lost city. He thought this Garden was made more for walking then just standing still and looking at flowers. It’s all squares, there are walls and steps. He thought of how pretty the moss made it. The stone wasn’t clean but weathered. He thought the garden initially must have looked like a stamp pressed into the countryside. He thought the countryside was pressing back with little bits of dirt, grass and moss. The earth loosened the squared structure of the walls, making softer lines. It’s as if the stones settled into their true fitting, ignoring the mortar in between them. Most of the mortar had turned into powder.
He followed the garden all around and thought of how much it sprawled! It was so huge, so much money and power in a different time created this. Different, weird people. Did they even have electricity? He knew the big old stone house that this garden belongs to must be a whole city of this experience.
At the far end of the garden he found a small exit that faced a steep hill. The hill was thickly dressed with trees. The passage seemed private and intimate and it intrigued him. He went through the exit and followed a steep unkempt path that lead up the wooded hill. He thought that if he was on higher ground he could get a great view of the garden and the whole estate and maybe even the big old stone house, no, mansion in the distance! He thought the path to be quite private, it looked older than the others and was barely the width of one person. It was very steep, his legs burned a bit, but he reached the top of it. It leveled off and faced a wall of brown rock. The path lost its lively turns and was now a plateau, a floor, but it wasn’t clear for what. He looked back down the hill and realized he was wrong, he could not see the garden or anything from up here. Just woods. But why the path, why this floor, why the wall of rock? Austin walked a little further around the rock wall and finds himself looking at something wholly different.
There is a tall thin statue of the most attractive woman he has ever seen. The rock wall is set back around the statue. Austin froze, “This is something special, this was a secret, this was hidden, this was loved” He thought, “I found this, it’s been alone for a long time and now this is mine. She is so realistic, like a frozen woman. Here, in the dead of these woods and stone and moss and leaves and vines.” He was afraid to touch her, he was afraid to go near, he could only look. His eyes bathed every inch of her, finding only perfection. She was a myth, the perfect woman, and yet here she was real and tangible. He sat and rested by her. The day’s exploration had yielded the greatest treasure, the perfect woman.
Over the next weeks he would trot through the woods to the abandoned garden, up the hill, and unto the rock wall where lived the most attractive woman he had ever seen. He’d bring a book and read by her. He loved that she was frozen and could not talk or say anything bad about him. He took to talking to her. He liked how he could admit his thoughts and say all the dirty things he ever wanted to say.
On occasion, when his hormones were really firing, he would grow unintentional arousal. At a time like this he actually touched her. He knew she would be hard as stone but he wanted to know the dimensions of a woman’s body parts. To Austin, a woman’s body is an incredible new, foreign thing. He wanted to know what the perfect breasts felt like, and his desire was overwhelming. He touched them and thought them perfectly round and perfectly shaped. He put his hands around her waist, then her thighs, then on her butt. He liked the part where her waist and abdomen met her legs. He liked how smoothly her butt became her lower back, how strong and thin her legs were. I bet she could run a lot when she wasn’t frozen. Fast too.
He felt like he was growing up, he was feeling the dimensions of a real woman. His friends at school had no idea about a real grown female. They liked girls in his age range but their bodies were different and underdeveloped. He was becoming a true master of female anatomy.
Within the same year he kissed his first girl. There was a flurry of activity surrounding this type of event. Who likes who? Are they going to the party? Who else is going? Is there going to be beer? Are they going to make out? Austin could tell that it was childish and immature. He had seen his mother and father’s flame turn into little embers that turned into ash. He felt removed from it all when he would wonder, “Is this where it started for my parents too? Kisses after school? Sleep over parties?” The girls have awkward bodies the boys have even more awkward faces. Everyone is half developed, crooked and boney.
He made the mistake of really liking a girl. She was pretty and funny. She was small. They made out but it turned out she didn’t like him that much. This was his first experience of heartache. Heartache is a weird thing when it’s new. Invisible pains that attack your ability to swallow, breath, and think. He didn’t feel close enough to anyone to talk to about it. He knew where he felt most comfortable in the world and he ran off to her. He felt different as he stood before her. He felt like he was a man who tried immature girls but now returns to his real standards. Only a real man could love this real woman. She was tall, slender, and had the most perfect body with the most perfect curves. Her face was flawless, it was sharp and soft at all the right parts. He deserved her. She was the most real of all woman, the perfect woman, frozen. Frozen so that he could find her and he could know the standard, he could know what to expect, what to want.
He would accept nothing less than a woman like this in his life. But he suspected a terrible detail, there might not be a woman out there as perfect as her. “I have to be real so I can have you! You have to wake up!” He grabbed her forearm and tried to shake it to wake her up. He was very emotional at this moment and he rubbed it again. He held onto her. He felt something under his hands. The stone felt smoother. He realized that the stone had absorbed the oils from his hand. He grabbed it with his other hand and the same effect occurred. He realized that he needed more oil from his hands. He rubbed his hands on the back of his neck then rubbed them onto her forearm he did it again and then a third time. His neck felt like it was rubbed dry. “My head” he thought, “My head has sweat in it”. He rubbed his hands in his hair and on his scalp. His hands were oily again. He rubbed her arm and hand. It became very smooth and the heat of his hands warmed it a bit. The oil started to change the bright white stone into a darker color. He rubbed his back and found more sweat and he rubbed it onto the stone. In that little area on her arm he felt that which he could not believe but wanted more than anything in the world: She was soft to his touch. This gave him all the motivation he could possibly need.
“If I can make the stone soft, I can turn her stone into skin… I can bring the most real woman to life.” He ran down the hill, he ran around in the old garden, he ran on the grass that hadn’t been ran on in decades and decades. He kicked up the still air that sat in the garden around the stone and vegetation.
He scaled the hill. He was winded and sweaty. He thought he must hurry before the sweat evaporated. He gave her a big hug and rubbed his face into her abdomen. He ran his hands all over his sweaty body and rubbed them all over her. His shirt was damp with sweat, so he took it off and rubbed her down with it. He concentrated on her left arm and sure enough it got softer. “It’s working, it’s actually working.” “I will have a real woman. But look how tall she is. It will take a lot of sweat to bring her to life.”
He kept at it day after day. He would bring a big water bottle for him to drink and turn into sweat. Within the week, patches of her got soft. A large patch on her arm and abdomen became so soft he could push down and see, actually see an impression in the stone.
“This is going to work.” He exhaled after an exhausting session. “This will work, but it’s going to take a lot of sweat.” There were soft patches all over her and a general smoothness everywhere else. He started to notice that his skin was growing unnaturally dry and coarse. Sometimes it felt like he had little grains of sand stuck in his skin, especially on the back of his neck and hands.
The sky grew dark. A deep blue made all the colors of the woods vibrant greens and shades of brown. A rainstorm was coming. It terrified him. He ran to her and saw the rain beading on her smooth skin. He pulled his shirt off and covered what he could. He grabbed thick pine branches and put them on her shoulders and head. He was shirtless and soaking wet. Parts of his skin were covered in goose bumps but other parts, like the back of his neck, felt nothing and the skin would not contract into goosebumps. He looked at her with panic and loyalty, he drank the fear and in his gut committed to her more.
The next day after the rain he found the terrible results. The rain had dried her. The water washed the oil out of some of the underdeveloped areas, but it seemed that his best patches remained soft. The day after was very humid and damp. Although the rainstorm was bad, one good thing could happen with the damp humid day. A tremendous amount of sweat could be produced. He ran extra hard, it became a very successful day. Her entire forearm and hand were as soft as skin. “Someday soon her wrist will turn and her joints will bend. I just have to give more.”
Weeks passed and he kept at it. His skin grew very dry and hard, it was unnerving. “It must be calluses.” he thought. Sometimes it felt like little grains of sand were suck in his skin. He ignored it, “I still have lots more soft parts of skin.” He stuck to his routine of running around and drinking water, the sweat was coming much slower but he was making a lot of progress. Her legs were now completely soft and he felt satisfied since that was such a large muscle group.
The calluses grew. He thought that if he rubbed even harder he could wear away a lot of the calluses and get to the soft skin underneath. He did so. He rubbed hard and noticed a dark color appearing on her waist where he was rubbing. He looked at his forearm and noticed little beads of blood bubbling on his rough hard skin. He tried to rub the blood color off of her. But there was an unexpected result, she grew quickly soft with the blood. “Blood works better than sweat!” He looked down at his forearm, the blood had stopped suddenly and instead of raw skin his forearm looked gray and was as hard as rock. He reasoned, “No problem, I have other calluses on my body.”
He rubbed harder and harder, breaking the calluses and exposing blood. His skin was getting very hard. But the progress! He could now push his finger into any part of her body. Her entire body was soft. Incredibly, she grew a skin tone all over her, she was less and less white. Amazingly, her wrist and fingers bent. Only a little, but it happened, it really happened.
He massaged her hands, he kneaded so hard his muscles became sore and tight. Finally, her hands became entirely limp. He held her hands, they didn’t hold back, but it didn’t matter, “They will”. He put his face in her hands, he wanted to feel her touching his face. He rolled his face in her palms and he held her hand to show her how to hold his head. He rubbed his face more and made a tear on his forehead. He saw his blood on her hands. He wished they reacted, but they were limp, he rubbed the blood in. Her arms grew entirely limp, they hung at her side. He felt dizzy and needed to sit. He took a step back, stood and looked at her wonderful arms.
Soon after, with more blood given, all her joints could move. He was exhausted and dizzy. She was now standing. Not a frozen statue but standing. He marveled at her amazing body. He wished it would move, he wished he could see her chest expand and contract with breath. But, “It’s not her fault.” He thought. “I haven’t done her face yet where her mouth is.” He wanted to save her face for last. He wanted to see the joy on her face when she saw her body alive. He wanted to see the joy on her face when she saw that it was he who brought her to life. He didn’t want her to wake up and be disappointed that parts of her weren’t alive yet. He didn’t want her to be mad at him.
He was breathing hard, his chest felt so heavy. He was dizzy. His ankles did not bend, he was trying not to sit or stop moving. It seemed that when he was still his joints would lock. He fell over. The ground was soft and warm it contained all his trampling. The moss was gone from sight. He rubbed his forearm and something felt terrible, his wrist and elbow would not bend. He breathed heavy, “That’s Okay,” He reasoned, “I have more limbs and joints that can move.”
He tried to rub her but it just sounded like stones scraping. He tried to draw blood but his skin was too hard. With immense sadness he allowed the thought, “I’m turning to stone.” “I’ve come this far and…” His breath was heavy and cumbersome. When his chest and lungs expanded and contracted he could hear scraping sounds inside his chest. With a dizzy head he was frustrated, “Only her head is left and don’t know what else to give.” He grew sad, his mouth was dry. He could move his neck but his face was stiff. He hung his head.
The sadness was overwhelming. Minutes passed as he tried to stay awake. He saw a couple drops of water on his thigh. “What’s that from?” He thought, “I’m crying. That’s it!” “I’ll use my tears.” Slowly, he clamored up to her. He threw his stone arms around her and pulled himself up. He put his wet eyes onto her neck. He felt her chin on his neck. “I can still feel on my neck.” “That’s how I’ll do it, but I have to make it count.” While holding onto her, he took his hard stone finger and ground it into his neck. He scraped until blood came out. He brought his neck to the part of her neck that his tears had softened.
It had the desired effect, the spot on her neck absorbed every last drop. Her complexion changed, her stone face turned to skin. Her hair dropped into flowing waves and her face muscles slowly twitched. Finally, finally, her eyelids flickered and her impossible eyes came to life. Truly she was the most beautiful woman conceivable.
The Goddess.
The ideal.
He fell back. He tried to hold on but the weight of his stone body made him drop to the ground. “I want to see her. I want her to see me.” On the floor, he tried to pick himself up. He could barely move, “No” he whimpered, “After all this I don’t even get to see everything I gave? Don’t walk away.” He mustered the last of his will power and strength. Everything was numb and scraped and the sound tortured his mind. But his desire for his Goddess pushed right through the torment of his new damnation. He straightened his body as much as he could. He lifted his head as much as he could. Through the tops of his eyes he could see her.
She had not moved. She stood just as she always had. She looked at him with curiosity. He was a strange little sight, awkward, clumsy, and only half animated.
“She’s a woman.” He thought. “Is she too old to appreciate me because I’m younger? It doesn’t matter. She is the perfect woman. The ideal” He said to himself. “She is more beautiful than I could have possibly imagined.” His desire for her grew greater than anything he had ever felt. She is his and she is more beautiful than any woman on earth. She is perfect. The ideal woman.
He reached his hand up to hers, he held her hand, her hand did not clasp his in return. He pulled himself up with her hand. He brought his face up to hers aching to taste her. He extended and extended his joints through grinding sounds. His stone hips and back cracked. Finally, finally, he reached her face, he brought his face to hers. They kiss and they are bound. With that kiss, he gives his last, and turns to stone. His grip on her loosens and his weight drives him backwards.
She watches him curiously. He hits the ground hard and begins to roll over. He rolls onto the steep part of the hill and his immense weight throws him down the hill. He knocks over twigs and slides with leaves and loose dirt. He smacks against some trees and bark sprays.
Finally, the statue of Austin settles at one of the entrances to the garden. The beautiful statue is dusted with dirt and leaves and bark. His pose is frozen in his final act.
The beautiful woman stands at the top of the hill and she looks down at him quizzically. Austin the statue is now a part of the garden. All is silent and no one is around.
In the garden the light begins to change. Every stone, rock, fountain, and moss are licked with a shade of blue gray. The grass and moss become brilliant green in the new light. The wind picks up and loose leaves and dirt pull off of the statue of Austin. The beautiful woman still stands at the top of the hill. She looks around at the the leaves stirred by the wind. She looks to the distant sky and sees the source: Steep, full, storm clouds are approaching.
She looks at the storm without opinion.