Set in Stone

by Randall Brown

Out Maya's window, they're shooting the concrete for the pool and beyond that one of the men has his pants yanked down to his ankle. He squats next to the weeping willow and shits in one burst. He pulls his pants back up and ambles back to the pool.

She's down to the basement in a flash, out the sliding door, in his face. "What the fuck was that? You an animal or something? You sick fucking pig."

"I didn't know you were home," he says. Wipes his nose. Hikes up his pants. Grabs the concrete hose, jumps into the hole, shoots the pool as if she still weren't there.

She pulls a plug out of its socket. The concrete sputters, stops.

"Why you have to be a bitch about this," he says. "You want your pool done or not?"

A man sits in a cement truck. Another man looks down from the hill. Someone calls out, "Break for lunch." The man sets his hose down, turns to leave. He's in the pool that used to look like an elephant grave, before the cement. She's on the edge, looking down.

"I'm calling somebody," she says.

"Figures," he says. "The door was locked. You weren't home. Did you ever think we might have to shit? Most people leave a door open or something."

Maya knows exactly what to do, but cannot think of how to make it happen. It's that concrete, the hose, a punishment goddesses render, a transformation of man into statue. What would happen to skin, organs, bones in that tight tomb?

"I guess I'll have to settle for getting you fired." She's done with dealing with the animals. As she turns, he grabs her ankle-and then she's twisting, falling as if into the earth, alive.

***

Something has happened to that weeping willow; it grows wider, unable to be trimmed, its limbs reaching out, taking over, its daily growth visible by the hour, like the hair of the dead in the grave. Days go by, her lost in watching, wondering what she should've done, wondering how far apart the gods and mortals are in their ideas of mercy, punishment, suffering, pride.

They might've walled her into the pool, buried her. Then she might've been discovered. Instead, there's the mystery of life hidden beneath the stone. The boy, Jack, calls her Flora, the goddess of gardens, the wife of the wind, possessive of the power of fertility. He kisses her feet before planting tiny plots of seeds, whispers his prayer, "Let there be life." Irony comes from the heavens—that much has been made clear to her.

One spring later, the man returns, a cracked pump. He purposely averts his gaze away from the hill. He looks everywhere but there, the way he did before squatting and shitting on her lawn. Bent over the pump, his ass crack open to the wind, he remains unchanged.

Maybe sometimes there's no learning, only a vengeful rage unbound by time. He walks over to her, looks around again, pisses at her feet.

In myths, perhaps she'd be brought to life at this moment. Instead, here, there's only his sharp laughter, as if she has gotten what, all along, she deserved.

***

The world blows all winter, the wind full of needles. She still hasn't let go of the possibility for that moment when someone asks "What have you learned?" and with her answer, the stone cracks like ice and she melts back into life.

Instead, Jack wobbles on his kid legs against the blasts of wind. He slips up the hill. Oh, he has a blanket, white and green. He wraps it around her, pulls tape out of his pocket, wraps the tape around her too.

"Wow," she whispers.

"I knew it," he says. "No one ever listens."

"Watch for the willow. It wants things."

"Everything does," he says.

***

Jack works slowly, a tiny rock hammer.

"What if there's nothing inside, if I'm the stone?"

"Should I stop?"

"No. Go on."

He does. She asks him if he's afraid of what he might find, a body without skin, the undead. He says he doesn't believe in all that. He will be at this forever, but he's young and time does not deter him.

"A toe," he says, "Maybe by spring."

Such ease with the world. Such a sense of wonder. Did she once have what he now held? She wondered why the world had no use for innocence except as something to be lost or destroyed.

***

Spring again. Jack has hammered away specks and bits of concrete. He's talked of his parents as if they were characters in a far-off drama. A nanny has spent a winter watching from the window.

He hammers now, close to something—and maybe a hole is all she needs. He hammers and hums a song from Winnie the Pooh about stairs neither halfway here nor halfway there. The willow reaches for Jack, but he swings at the hammer and the willow retreats.

Then, he's there. "You, kid." Jack isn't paying attention. "Yeah, kid. I'm fucking talking to you."

"Jack." Frantic and crushed by weight, she can't find her voice. "Jack!" He looks up at her.

He's being lifted by the back of his jacket into the air. It's cartoonish, like Bluto grabbing Sweet Pea. "You deaf?"

"No. I hear things."

"Yeah. Well there's this, okay? You're ruining the statue. Mucho money for your mom and dad."

Jack should know but of course he doesn't. No one does, what actions create, which ones doom. "Down," Jack says. He's a little thing set against vastness.

"Let it go, Jack." Some things aren't worth it.

"No," Jack says. He holds the tiny rock hammer like a weapon.

"No?" the man says. "No?" He clenches his teeth. "You leave that statue alone, you hear."

It could go back and forth like this, no? no?, but Jack swings his tiny hammer; its metal end strikes the man's eye, and Jack drops, tumbles down the hill, the man stumbling and screaming, knocking her over, end over end, toward the pool, toward Jack, sprawled on the flagstone, over a rock wall, in the air, and she envisions the landing, the shattering into bits and pieces.

On the ground, Jack, arms spread out, waits to be crushed.

The man screaming still, Cyclops, the son of sky and earth.

What have you learned?

Nothing matters.

The rock gives way to flesh, to skin, and she is a tiny thing, a girl, tumbling after Jack.

The creature on the hill roars after them. She pulls on Jack's arm, gets him moving, and now from stone to motion, a wild run, the creature flailing and grunting.

"I have to go," Jack says.

"Run," she pulls on her little legs, pumping.

"Bad. I have to go. Number 2," he says.

Ah, the gods, goddesses. They're really quite transparent. A joke, really, like Oedipus marrying his mother, not knowing, giving birth to kids the world will treat as monsters. Funny stuff. Like Jack and the creature behind them, when you have to go, you have to go. What is she to understand? The urges of bowels? She's had enough.

She stops and confronts the one-eyed monster of myths. She regains her size. A woman, Maya, who looked out her window and saw the man crapping on her lawn and wanted him to own up to it because it was her lawn, her house, her world he crapped all over. She wasn't wrong. The heavens know nothing of the world.

"I gotta go now," Jack says.

"No one's going anywhere," the man-creature growls. But he's wrong, the whole world is.

Jack squats in the lawn. Maya grabs his tiny hammer, swings upward and the man bursts into air, bye bye, and Maya transforms into a bird, bye bye, and Jack gets smaller and smaller until he disappears. Ah poor Jack, infinitely small, a tiny squat.

"Come back," he calls. "Come back."

She does. It's a funny thing, her return, from woman to statue to girl to woman to bird. So many choices. One never knows.

Jack calls again, "Come back."

But as what? That, she understands now, is the question.

***

Summer. Jack and Maya sit on the branches of the willow tree. They hide things in their secret knot hole. Smooth rocks, odd-shaped leaves, the shells of eggs. The pool, they say, is a lake or maybe an ocean. No one can find them. They are all there is.

© 2009 Night Train and respective authors/email support AT nighttrainmagazine.com