The statue never wants to stand in the gallery. It wants to live like all of the colorful people it encounters on a daily basis. Anyone with eyes could see its desire to move. The muscles sculpted out of ancient marble are tensed and tired of standing still for so long.
When the lights go out and the doors are locked, the statue wants to rest. It cannot in its infinite condition. Sometimes it can squeeze out a single tear from one of its solid eyes. The wear and tear from these single tears can be seen by the black streaks on its cheeks. The rest of it is all an off-white pigment.
Once a year, a man comes along and scrapes off the black grime with a toothbrush. That’s the only time that man comes to visit the statue. He doesn’t even stop to stare at the other pieces of art. He doesn’t even admire the statue, and the statue knows.
The statue can only imagine what the Olympic Games are like now. It was modeled to look like one of the active lives that entered the competition many years before television and the United States. It wants to be the skin twin, despite the mortal death. Living this long is not worth it to this particular statue. It doesn’t know whether or not other statues down the gallery feel the same way. If it could, it would walk down the hall and ask.
The other statues do not cry like this one. But one time, the statue in question remembers one of the statues older than it fell from its resting place and shattered in the night. The white marble chunks all over the dark floor looked like the stars in the sky. But alas, it was repaired.
– Philip James Sterwerf
philipsterwerf.wixsite.com/philipsterwerf
