Her hand was frozen in its pull of long hair back from her face. She looked on the setting: a dirty-floored area of cast-off things and bits of rubble and dreck around her.
It’s only temporary, she thought. Someone will find me. Confident in her curves, she was sure, they’ll admire my form and take me home, a perfect adornment for conversation.
Days and weeks passed, she still sat alone and wondered, no one has come… and if they don’t, who will appreciate me? If nobody admires me, how can I come to life?
She was learning that no matter how beautiful, finely formed, even talented or smart, you are… if others don’t know it, then nothing happens. But she could not be discovered by herself.
She was but a statue.
One morning there was motion and noise. Was this it? Had they come for her?
Within her range of vision, she watched the old man who had brought her there, as he went about adding more forgettable things to the—she now realized—already forgotten. As he piled it around, there was less and less light, and her view diminished. The last box—sagging, wet, cardboard sides already splitting at the corners—completed the stack that closed her in. The man’s steps receded, then came the metallic sound of chains through a pulley. She sensed as much as listened to the lowering door. The closing. Of everything.
As her world grew dimmer… then dark, she thought of how humans could stand and make things—circumstances—change. They could learn from their past, deal with the present, and create their future. But she was just a statue.
