Fairy Tale Review

The statue in the yard has the peculiar effect of following us with its eyes. Perhaps this is because it’s the only thing in the yard, and because the yard is walled with six-foot white-painted cinderblocks. Perhaps it is because it used to be a living thing, now frozen for viewing pleasure. We walk around it and each of us swears its head tilts just so its eyes can follow us. But only when we look at it, which is not often. We have to keep looking at our feet as the ground is composed of rocks the size of five-year-old-human skulls and is generally difficult to walk on.

Back when it was alive, the statue was a floating creature named Beatrice. It mostly looked like what we would call a human, though this could be said for most mammals, one of us mentions, depending on how specific the criteria we use to determine this is. So: The creature Beatrice looked exactly like a human, except for the two stubby wings attached to its shoulder blades (imagine a dolphin’s flippers), which never moved, and a sort of fusing together of the legs (imagine a taproot), which became foggy and undefined as shin area approached ankle. Ankle became nothing—no feet (imagine a ghost). In life, Beatrice’s coloring was a transitioning from dark gray at the crown of the head to a bone white at the hips, and then to colorless or transparent at the ankles. As a statue, it is a silvery mirror.

Beatrice’s head hangs low, arms outstretched as if holding onto or leaning against something: a wall, a fence, a lawn mower.

We don’t know why we’ve been brought to this place, why we’ve been instructed to look at this creature’s statued form, but we are glad for the opportunity anyway.

Inside of our collective body it is dark and murky—we bump into and slide past one another like those greased pigs in the pen, part of a game humans play sometimes. We are not so mindless, though, brushing our bodies against one another. It is a hug without arms, a reaching out, a touching of hands, fingertips. We cannot quite describe it. Beatrice is [End Page 56] not of us, could never be, even while alive, but this creature saw us, and we felt that was a kind of hug, in a way.

One of us thinks it was a Saturday when we first met Beatrice, but the rest of us agree it was a Wednesday.

We were huddled in a deep shadow between two buildings as we do when we find ourselves stuck inside the maze that is called “downtown.” If it were any other time, if the passerby was anybody else, we would not have been seen, heard—we would not have registered on any of the other’s senses. But this passerby was Beatrice, as we came to know later. At the time we thought it was human, so its calling out was shocking, startling our hearts. We now describe that initial feeling as “deeply unsettling.”

Hello? the voice said to us. What are you doing here? Are you lost?

We are not sure what gave the creature this impression, though it was true we were lost. With a human approaching us, scared, too. Frightened. To tears, almost. It was then, when a few of the braver ones looked closer at the figure speaking to us, that we saw the “wings” and “ghost tail.” We never learned what Beatrice called these parts of itself. Even the most timid of us released our breaths, though we all could only breathe shallowly.

We have no outward mouth with which to speak. Our voices face inside our collective body, so we can converse among ourselves, but it only sounds like deep rumbling to outsiders, large rocks falling off a mountain far away, we’ve been told. So while we said:

He-hello.

Can it hear us?

Why are we being spoken to?

Can you help us?

We are lost. How did you know?

Beatrice...