Quarter Circle

Several hundred marble statues surrounded me on all sides, I was aware of this I told myself, magpies drilling for oil in the recesses of the statues, they’re beady eyes bonding with the solidity of the structures, I looked down at the floor which seemed to reflect something awful, a kind of marble-liquid transparency, almost liquid, tangentially dry, I tried to judge where I stood from the edges of this mathematical sine/co-sine, I changed direction frequently, I held on to what seemed to specific handles in the otherwise smooth surface’s of the statues. I turned around, faintly recognising some shade of light listlessly seeping from the edges of some monasterial typography, my hand lifted to the distant glow, my eyes closed whilst I did this.

    As I had entered this biographical maze the light around me had changed, a thin gauze overcast the sun, and from the darkness came the statues, prominent in they’re motionless attitudes, half light, quarter light, full circle, half circle, quarter circle.

       I seemed to be closing in on something vast and invisible, the statues seemed so large in the half light, they appeared broken and old from a distance, but on close inspection they were so impossibly smooth that it seemed hard to conceive of someone actually making them, of placing hands upon them, of them ever being in another state other than this. perfect. pale. like frightened lambs in the moonlight, lifeless limbs in the deadlight, waxy pallours of the newly dead, almost serene. I ran my hands over the base of one of them, and felt slight indentations, some carved purpose, I remember thinking ‘it’s just exactly as I remember‘, and then recoiled at the memory, I glanced down to where my fingers where tracing patterns around a set of numbers cauterised into this stone.

  30.03.1056

I walked around to the base of the other statues, and found similar numbers, a strange curiosity, around me the shadows of the statues seemed to be lengthening, I thought for a second that they were multiplying and moving closer to me, a lust less lethargy gripped me, the odd milky moonless light had its own pernicious intensity. Carving a way through my sanity. I rested on the ledge of a statue, my hands instinctively feeling for the numbers, blind cave moth, when I became aware of my own nakedness on the cold flesh/stones, my skin like bright ivory, pale like the statues, cold like the statues, the light seemed to highlight every mark on my own pale parchment, I twisted to see the numbers on this statue:

30.03.1977

I let out a sigh of relief, for the time being this was my own statue, I looked down to the ground which seemed to be darker now, less solid, I tried to step onto it but my foot hit nothing. Just an empty space. I looked around and saw the other statues seemed to have receded into the distance, too far away for me to reach. I was here on this journey now, a specific carriage.