“A Garden of Marble Statues” - An Excerpt From a Work in Progress
What follows is a chapterette from a longer work. I think it works okay on its own, so I’d like to share.
Picture, if you will, a garden of marble statues. Not a lot of marble statues. I’d say seven. Each statue is a woman I have loved. Specifically loved, not just blindly lusted for. There’s not enough marble in the world for that.
There are seven marble statues. They’re all sized differently. Two are life-size, one is a miniature, about 1:1.5 scale, three are one and a half-times life-size. This leaves one last statue, and it’s a monster. It would be the size of the Colossus at Rhodes. Solid marble.
The size of the statue is equivalent to how madly in love with the woman I was. The ex whose note I found is life-size. If you’re going to picture this one in detail, she’s nude, but covering all the important bits with hair and hands, a bit like the Birth of Venus. She never had hair that long, though. I’m going to claim artistic license.
The 1:1.5 scale statue was my first girlfriend, a high school crush, a prom date. Once I graduated, she went off to school in some part of the country with nice weather and palm trees. We decided it would be easiest to end things rather than try and do the long-distance relationship thing. She didn’t even cheat on me, though I did find out through the grapevine that she started seeing someone else pretty quickly.
The colossus? I’m not ready to tell you about her, yet.
Patience.
There’s no real story to the other statues, save for the standard boy-meets-girl story. We don’t have time, and it would just drag things down.
