The Garden

A very brief story I wrote a while back and have frequently revised and edited. With this piece, I was attempting to describe a dream and inspire a specific mood with very little background info.

I sank into the shadows. I knew something was coming when a chill crept across my skin, the unnatural cold of approaching evil. My friends, silver in the dull, graying light, rushed me into the shadows cast by an old stone fence, then hurried back to their respective pedestals and became statues once more.

And we waited.

And I was afraid.

I could see everything that was occurring, but I wished that I could see nothing at all.

The man stalked through the darkness like some malevolent creature of the night. He was hunting, I could tell. He was swooping about in his cape, the color of the moonless night, and a top hat to match, wary and watchful and smug.

Was he hunting for me?

In my world, a place where it is always dark, where there is nothing but the faintest gray light to shine into the shadows that rule this place, it is always hard to recognize who you should hide from; but there's always a shadowy place for you to hide.

I tried to close my eyes as he lifted his hammer, but they remained wide and staring as he bludgeoned my stone friends, tearing apart my statues that came to life to play with me, to love me, to talk and teach and sing and laugh. The statues that were my kin in all the ways that matter.

I tried to close my ears to the sound of breaking stone, but the horrible crashing and crunching echoed in my ears, the sound thudding against my skull. It became a part of me in those moments where I hid out of sight, something to remember and mourn for the rest of my days.

He took his hammer and reduced them to shining powder and tiny shards and stone fragments, left to litter the dull gray earth forever. Their beautiful forms were destroyed. Their stone mouths and granite voices were forever silenced. Their souls, their wisdom, their love, eternally gone from me, to a place where I could not follow.

In those moments I wished he would break me too. I prayed that he would find me and crush my frail human body as easily as he had broken their stone flesh. I wished I could move or yell out, but all I could do was crouch in those cursed shadows and wait, terrified and furious and bleak.

In those moments I cursed my tiny little girl body, my pale and fragile human flesh; it was too weak to save my friends and too weak to join them in death. I cursed this paralyzing fear that held me here. But mostly I cursed that man who cloaked himself in darkness and shadows, and took my friends, my only family from me.

In those moments, I knew that he had ruined me. He destroyed everything that was anything in my little girl world where my dreams could still come true, where fantasies of a bright world full of hope could dance in the shadows like the dim stars in the sky. He took my friends from me, and with them my peace and my innocence, my childhood and my courage. I could see nothing that remained but the pieces, too broken to ever be put back together.

Once he was gone, and I could move again, I crawled out from my secret, shadowy hiding place. I was numb, shocked, afraid. And filled with a rage so hot, so pure and strong, I thought it would engulf me, burn me, until I was nothing but dead ashes on the ground.

I stood there, looking all around me with despairing, empty eyes, at the barren gray garden that was once full of friends, of family; stone yes, but still family, and the only family I had ever known in my short little girl life. Those stone statues had seen everything that had come before me, but they would see no more. They had been filled with purest life and love and spirit. Trapped, like I was, by something that held them here in the garden, they were blissful to be alive at all, no matter that it was in a cage of darkness, as silent as the grave, as far as the eye could see. Their laughter and sparkling, gravelly voices had filled this place just moments before, and now the silence reverberated on the empty pedestals with the oppressive absence of them.

I looked around me, surrounded by the sparkling gray dust and fragments of stone, all that was left of my fallen friends. In that moment I wept the saddest tears that have ever been wept anywhere. Salty, clear, glistening blood to fall and evaporate on their bloodless remains. Those tears joined my dead family on the dead earth, and inside, I died. Nothing remained inside of me but the loss, and the sorrow, and the burning desire to avenge their broken pieces cast aside and left lying on the departed earth.

Author's Note

One of my professors has said that I need to create a more narrative quality in order to appeal to readers, so please take special note of whether the lack of background information on the characters and setting has taken something away from the piece for you.