The Girl in the Flowerbed

For Halloween, the beginning of a story about this creepy ornamental statue in the yard across the side street.

She awoke in the flowerbed without wondering how she came to be there. Her unblinking eyes saw in a moment—when a moment before they had seen nothing—a neighborhood at night. Without moving her head and still without blinking, she glanced left and right.

The tulips that surrounded her might have been red in the light of day, but beneath streetlamps and stars their tightly closed petals were purple-gray. Beyond them, lining both sides of the flat gray street, sat single-story houses of colorless brick, some with faces clearly visible, others away from the false light and darker.

At the same time her eyes saw, her naked knees and shins and the tops of her bare feet felt the cool black dirt where she sat with her legs folded beneath her. She felt the light breeze in her hair and in the small feathers of her wings, felt it ruffle the silk chiffon chemise she wore and play along the smooth skin of her thighs. She felt it drawn inside her and with it the aromas of mown grass, rich dirt and the pale tulips. And with these, other, unnatural odors—of things burning that were not meant to burn.

She listened to the buzz of the streetlamp above her and the wild, muted fluttering of velvet wings against it; to hums of varying pitches and varying volumes from all along the street; a muffled voice from one house, thin music from another; a dog's bark, an answer farther away; a sudden, small, violent thrashing beneath a line of low pines. She listened until she had listened it all into the background.

Then she stood up and walked into the shadows without blinking or brushing the dirt from her knees. . . .

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