The Statue in the Town Square Came to Life

Spiderwebs clung to her long hair. She had been inanimate, barely moving for a matter of decades, smiling her frozen grin as she stared out at the world with glassy eyes. Now and again, a visage too horrible to smile at passed her view, and she seemed sad then, and her head bent a little as she looked away in pain or denial. Many springs had passed without a stirring from her, but it was the first warm fragrant breath that year that blushed those stone cheekbones rose. They were flushed and her face was anxious as she thought of all the lost time. Frantically she remembered all the time that had been allowed to just flow by, with not even a ripple of resistence from her. As she dared to recall those ages of inaction, inhumanly stagnant and lost to time, all of that empty space weighed upon her, and the aftereffect was a heavy lethargy as if she had forgotten how to move those limp inert limbs. She felt as if she was an antique covered in thick layers of dust, lost in a dark place of storage. The cobwebs hung off her as she tried to stirr, their sticky fragments gluing her to the surface, and to other parts of her so that she felt tangled up. She tried to breathe. Her breath also came from some place far away, from the distant past perhaps, with a loud rasp it scatched through all of those lost years in between, and drew a stop at the present moment.

The people in the town square turned to see the statue in the centre come to life. Her memory was shrouded in a fog that seemed heavy to her even now. What a strain it was to move those arms trapped in layers of cobwebs and dust, the remainder of all these long years! Still it was all that was left of them now. She performed the momentuous occasion of brushing them off. But the people in the square had already looked away, back to their own business. To them it seemed only natural that she who had overseen them for so long should one day join them.