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Message-ID: <43593asstr$1059279003@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: Alexis Siefert <ealexissiefert@yahoo.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} Lives Alone of Stone {MF} (Alexis S) 
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 00:10:03 -0400
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Lives Alone of Stone (MF) By Alexis Siefert (c) 2003
ealexissiefert@yahoo.com

   We've all had that feeling of danger.  You wake up from a dead sleep
with your heart pounding.  But there's nothing there.  Or was there?  We
are alone, ultimately, but there is someone out there.  Watching.

   ~~~~~~~

   I watched her as she entered the cathedral.  She moved like the water
under a bridge, with purpose but easily.  My eyes followed her as she
slipped into the protective shadows of the Saints, and my gaze fell upon
her breast as she wiped away the droplets of glistening sweat from the
hollow of her collar.  I knew that my companion watchers saw her, but I
could feel them dismiss her as she moved on.  She fell short of their
desires.  She didn't meet their expectations, and she wasn't worthy of a
second glance.  But I saw something different.

   We are the gargoyles.

   They laugh at us now.  We've been here since before their grandfather's
grandfather.  We've watched over them as children, running in the summer
grass.  In the spring, we've watched over them as friends throw rice to
bless their marriage.  We've smiled with them as they christen their
children.  We've guarded them in their grief as they say goodbye to loved
ones.  We've protected their sanctuary.  We've kept away the evil doers who
would violate the place they hold dear.  But they do not love us for it.

   Generations ago their ancestors created us.  They needed us.  They knew
that this building they were erecting would become a symbol of refuge and
safety.  They knew that it would also become a target for those who carry
darkness in their hearts.  So we were made.  We were carved from the stone
to last forever.  We were given faces to frighten even the most evil
wrongdoers.

   And for generations we were admired.  People looked up to us for
comfort. They knew that we were there to protect their wives and their
children and their spouses.  But then they stopped believing.  The world
around us became dark.  No longer could we protect the people from
evildoers.  Evil no longer took its home in the hearts of men.  It made its
home in man's fingers and arms and hands.  Evil took refuge in mankind's
eyes and their teeth.  Now that the wives and husbands and mothers could
see evil, they stopped believing.  They saw that evil was human, not
spiritual.  They saw the pain that humankind caused, and they thought that
they were seeing evil.

   But they were wrong.

   They saw only the reflection of evil.  What they were seeing was no more
the true essence of evil than the reflection of a tree in a passing creek
is the true essence of a tree.  But since it comforted them, they choose to
believe that they could see and touch and feel and control the bad things
in the world.  And then they stopped needing us.  That's when they started
laughing.

   They still come to Sunday morning mass.  They pass under our watchful
eyes and light their candles and pray their prayers and sing their songs.
They think that they're safe again because they've locked their doors and
barred their windows, and that will protect them from the evil they know.
Their children look up at the clouds and see our monstrous faces and they
laugh.  They think that we're the evil ones.  They think that we're the
ones that they're supposed to fear.  And since they don't fear us, they
feel invincible.

   When they started to laugh, we began to lose our purpose.  And a
gargoyle without purpose is nothing more than a block of stone.

   So we found a purpose.  Yes, we have conscious thought and intelligence,
and we feel the need to find reason in our existence.  We are not human,
but being created by men for an enlightened reason, we were endowed with
certain aspects of humanity.  Through their loving touch, through the
caress of chisel on stone and the loving stroke of finishing cloth on rough
edges the need for affection and love was breathed into us.  It became part
of our essence.  Perhaps that is why, under the laughter and scorn, we
could hear the uncomfortable edge of uncertainty in the belittling jeers.
Mankind knew that they created us, then abandoned us and left us to the
cruel elements.

   Many of my companions turned hard and unyielding.  They took comfort in
their stone encasements and ignored the warmth inside that fought to
escape. They could look upon the pain in the world and laugh.  They
considered it just retribution, an earned punishment for the people who
could so carelessly fling aside that which they brought into this world. 
As they looked upon the dark acts played by man against man, by woman
against child, and by child against animal, they laughed.

   But the others cried.  We saw mankind as they truly are.  Lost and
lonely.  Sad and unconnected.  Where once men and women and children came
together for safety and companionship, now they build walls around their
souls and fortified their battlements with barbed tongues and sharp eyes.
They allowed themselves to grow cold-not only to the inanimate stone
surrounding them, but also to the people who could have enriched their
lives.

   People live their lives like leaves in a galestorm.  They flutter about,
sure of their purpose and intent upon their destination, but they care
nothing and notice nothing of those whom they brush against.  No longer do
they see the lonely eyes of the waif on the corner.  No longer do they see
the pain of the drunk in the alley.  No more do they feel the cold of the
forgotten ones.

   We discovered that we could separate.  Separate from our stone bodies
and our fixed positions high above the dirt and grime of the city below. 
Late at night, when clouds cover the moon and the shadows fall short on the
pavement, when the cold wind blows and the few lost souls still wandering
the street shiver and draw deeper into their chins and collars.  It's not
hard.  It's painful at first-pulling away from the security of the stone
fortress that is the cathedral.

   That became our purpose.  We became not the hated and feared monsters,
but the warm and comforting arms around the lost souls.  Most couldn't see
us.  Most choose not to see the warmth that is surrounding them, especially
when it is in a guise that is unreal and frightening.  We were their dreams
or their visions or their nightmares.  We were the unseen hands guiding
them away from the busy intersection or pushing them away from the predator
in the shadowed corner.

   And that was enough.  For most of us.  For a while.  We became the
guardian angels.  People were so willing to believe in angels.  They feared
us, so they choose not to believe in us, hoping to kill what frightened
them.  But in some ethereal, light and joyous vision of wings and halos,
they were comforted.  So they choose to make us their angels.  Our good
works, our loving touch, our unseen support was credited to the truly
uncaring 'angels.' Mankind refused to believe that the angels of which they
spoke could not care an iota less for their insignificant lives.  Mankind
was mere amusement for the heavenly hosts.  They were pets.  Lower than
pets.  Ants in a Plexiglas box.  Fascinating to watch as they went about
their insignificant lives almost as though they had purpose, but not worth
second thought as they burned to charred remains under the magnifying glass
held in a thoughtless playground game.

   No, the angels weren't mankind's protectors.  We were.  Mankind created
us; then they attempted to make us less real.  But it doesn't work like
that.

   One would think that we would be too frightening to be seen by humans.
But over the centuries I've discovered one certain thing about the human
mind.  It has unlimited power to create and redefine.  When we allow
ourselves to be seen, people don't see us as the fearsome creatures with
gnarled faces and steel-cold wings and talons.  We're not seen as monstrous
beings of stone.  The human mind protects itself.  If they see us at all,
they see strangers.  Cold and fearsome, perhaps, but human.

   But usually they don't see us.  They might glimpse from the corner of
their vision a shadow on the wall, a spectral image quickly dismissed by
their rational mind.  So we travel amongst them.  Observing.  Listening. 
Following.  Protecting.

   Occasionally we force ourselves into their vision.  We spread our wings
and rise to our full height.  We turn their eyes towards us with the
strength of our silent voices, heard deep in their souls.  But only when we
must.  Only for those who are truly beyond salvation.  For the unforgivable
evil ones who travel amongst people, disguised as human.  For the
destroyers of innocence.  Those who prey upon the good and delicate that
resides in all people.  There are those amongst you.  Do not doubt it. 
There are those people born with such darkness in their soul that goodness
and light becomes physically painful.  There are those who are truly evil.
Blights upon the world.  When we find them, we destroy them.  They gaze
upon us and know that there is something more powerful than the hate that
fuels their existence.  And that knowledge destroys their mind.

   You've seen our work.  You've seen them gibbering to themselves as they
attempt to quiet their frightened souls with drink and drugs.  They don't
last long.  The 'lucky' ones find their way to asylums, where they live the
remainder of their lives in a haze of delirium and diagnoses of paranoid
delusions.  The unlucky ones live the remainder of their pitiful lives
shunned and abandoned.  They deserve no better.

   *

   I saw her first during the heat of summer.  An early August evening, and
the city was bound by the inhuman heat of the sun on sidewalk.  Waves
shimmered off of the pavement like ripples in the sand.  She, like so many
others, sought refuge from the blistering sun in the relative cool of the
cathedral's pews.  She walked like so many around her.  Tucked in to her
own being.  Surrounded by people, yet cut off by choice.  It was as though
I could see the barrier she'd built, invisible to human eyes, but obvious
to the human spirit.

   So many people walked as she did.  They were one within a throng of
bodies.  Shoulder to shoulder with the people of the city.  All but
touching one another.  But so apart.  The walls they build around their
souls are palpable to the world.  They are felt by anyone who comes close
enough to feel the heat of the other's body.  Then, confused, they refuse
to understand why they are alone and lonely.

   I watched her move.  She slid through the church doorway like a snake
through desert sand.  Finding the path of least resistance through the
worshipers.  She moved with purpose and with a quiet ignorance.  As though
those around her were mere shadows.

   She knelt, crossed her breast and shoulders and moved to light a candle.
Her lips moved in prayer as the flame touched wick, sparked and crackled. I
let myself drift closer until I could hear her whispered plea.

   As her flame touched each candle, her lips moved.  "Gabriel, hear me. 
Take my prayer."

   Interesting.  A prayer to Gabriel.  To the patron saint of messengers.

   Another candle, another payer.  "St.  Francis de Sales, hear my prayer.
Open my ears, bless my hands."

   Ah, of course.  Her walls were not all self-imposed.  She was deaf.  Her
world was silent not by choice, but by design.

   Another candle.  A whispered prayer to Valentine and Jude.  To lovers
and desperate causes.

   The saints don't listen.  They don't exist.  But we do.

   *

   I followed her home that night.  Through crowded streets and murky
pathways through the park.  She moved as one possessed with the knowledge
that she is invisible to those around her.  So many invisible people in
this city!  My stone heart aches to see them, alone by their own design. 
With my knowing eyes, I can see their souls crying out silently, "See me!
Notice me!" But they move on alone.  They fold their arms around their
shoulders and hug themselves as protection.  Even in the warmth of the
summer sun they act as though they're freezing.  I can see that the city
has turned them cold from the inside outside.  Upside down.

   Watching her, I realize something about these invisible people.  They
think, they believe that they're at peace with themselves.  They've tricked
their beings into believing that what they crave is the safety of solitude.
Words come to me.  Words overheard, spoken by the philosophy students
passing from the afternoon coffeehouse to evening pub.  "He makes a
solitude, and calls it-peace!" This is what Byron meant.

   And I felt something else.  A stirring in my stone cold center.  A
longing for something I'm yet to find a name for.  I watched her back as
she stepped lightly over the muddy puddles left by children playing in the
illicitly opened fireplug.  The way her hips moved beneath the thin cotton
of her summer dress.  There was a tug where my heart should be at the flash
of pale skin as the hem of her skirt flipped up when she stepped from the
curb to the concrete step of the brownstone house with the heavy wooden
door.

   The curve of her forearm, melding delicately into the bird-like bones of
her wrist as she pushed key into lock drew me up the steps behind her.  I
didn't know if she'd notice me or not.  Most people don't.  Most people
know that we can't exist, therefore their minds dismiss us as imaginary. 
She was no different.  I slipped in easily before she thought to turn and
pull the door tightly closed.

   She went through the minutiae of life, which allowed me to watch her
movements.  Checking the mailbox, sifting through the circulars and "to
occupant" envelops, tucking the few bills into her handbag and tossing the
rest neatly into the foyer trash can before mounting the stairs.  No
doorman at her building.  No security beyond the heavy double-bolt door
facing the street.  No elevator either.  A long walk up in this heat to her
fourth floor apartment.

   She walked quickly.  No pausing at the landings.  No stopping to catch
her breath between floors.  Keys out and ready.  A woman trained for life
in the city.  No fumbling at the door, giving the thug down the hall a
chance to attack.  Keys out, key in the lock, turn, open, in, close, and
lock.  She was faster here than at the outside door.  Interesting.

   I stood for a moment outside her apartment, imagining her inside.  I
could so easily move into her space.  I could without effort find her
bedroom window and watch her as she undressed.  I realized that I longed to
see her naked form as she slipped between her cool bed sheets.  I imagined
her frustrated body, craving the touch of a loving partner, finding brief
release and solace instead in the knowing touch of her own fingers.

   I left her that night.  But I knew I'd return.

   But there was something I didn't know.  As I was watching her, they were
watching me.

   *

   She came back to the church.  They always come back to light their
candles and say their prayers.  I followed her, this night bird.  She drew
me.  Something alone in her soul called to me.  I could hear her coming. 
Her footsteps were as loud and distinct as the distant jackhammers of the
street workers.

   Always at night she came.  After work, perhaps.  Always coming from
somewhere.  It told in her gait, in the set of her shoulders against the
world.  For weeks I watched, silently, from my perch above the entrance. 
And for weeks I followed her home, stopping only outside of her door,
listening with my unnatural ears as she moved about her apartment.

   I imagined her living her life like those others I've seen.  Moving from
room to room.  From living room to kitchen, pouring a drink from a vaguely
marked bottle.  Turning on the radio-no-not this one.  No music for her
deaf ears.  Perhaps the television for companionship.  The moving
electronic lights casting their artificial images upon the walls.

   Dropping clothes to the floor as she moves from the kitchen to the
bedroom.  Stripping away the dirt and the grime collected simply by walking
through the streets and the gray air of the city.  Exposing bits of skin to
the empty room as she drifts through her space.  I could see the line of
her shoulder, the dip of her waist, the curve of her thigh as she glides,
naked, from bedroom to bathroom and steps into the steamy cover of a
lateevening shower.

   But I saw this only in my imagination and all in an instant as I stood
invisible outside her apartment door and listened to her body float quietly
inside.

   It would have been an easy thing to find her apartment from outside.  To
watch through the clear pane glass of the window.  Denizens of the city
grow careless.  Even as they double- and triple-lock their doors, they
forget to draw their curtains.  Fourth floor, twelfth floor, anything above
the street and they feel safe from prying eyes.  But they forget that there
are eyes everywhere.  Human and inhuman.  There are creatures of the night
who watch and wait.  Lying in the shadows, preparing to strike.  I see
them. I was created to see them and to thwart them.  When children thrash
beneath their bedcovers and call to their mothers in fear; when women wake
with a frightened cry upon their lips; when men sit up in bed, hearts
pounding and pulse racing; those dreams come not from the subconscious. 
Those dreams are not byproducts of a bad dinner or a bad meeting or late
night television.  Those dreams are real.  Those dreams are the creatures
that inhabit the darkness.  They come to the bedrooms through open curtains
and opened closet doors.  Human beings wake in time to survive.

   The night-beings are afraid.  They approach only when their intended is
asleep and vulnerable.  When their victims have open minds and open hearts.
But when they awake, the beings scuttle off, back into the shadows to lurk.
They come to steal the breath, to inhale the life force of the weak ones.
They thrive on the stolen essence of being.

   Cats, rats, mice, snakes.  Those are the lowliest of the night
creatures. Those are the ones that men know and that men suspect.  There
are others.  There are those that have become the stuff of movies and of
stories.  Dark, slithering creatures in the floorboards and under the beds.
Scritching creatures in attics and closets.  Lurking eyes and glistening
claws that reflect in the moonlit corners of darkened rooms.

   And if the pounding heart and beating pulse and stifled cry and thrashed
bedcovers fail to wake the victims?  What then?

   Then they fail to ever wake again.

   So we, the gargoyles, roam the darkness.  We breathe our stone-cold
breath through the same open curtains.  We knock our hardened wings against
rattling windowpanes, and we scream our silent cries into the sleeping ears
of the intended victims.  When we are not too late, we help to vanquish the
embodiments of evil that inhabit the homes and bedrooms of the innocent.

   But when we are too late?

   Then we return to the church.  We slink back through the streets and the
shadows that are our homes as well.  We crawl to our perches and resume our
watch and feel the sinking stones in our artificial souls that tell us we
have, again, failed.  And we wait to stand guard over the processions as
the living say their farewells to those passed.

   So I didn't find her window.  I stood there like the solid creature I am
and listened to her breath.  I listened to her slide between her indulgent
silk sheets and sigh deeply at the welcoming warmth of her bed.  I listened
to her curl her arms around her pillow and draw it between her knees for
comfort.

   I stood outside her home and knew her in her bedroom.  I knew, without
seeing, that as she curled around her pillow, she curled her body around
her hand between her thighs and she stroked the softness there.  I could
hear her fingers draw along the moisture, parting her lips, caressing
softly.  I imagined what I had watched, eons ago, of women and men.  I
stood, gargoyle-still, against her door and listened to her thumb scrape
along the hardening nub above her parted cleft.  I knew the change of
pressure, the more insistent stroking, circling, hardness of her fingertips
dipping, thrusting, stroking the soft inside of her sex.

   Her breathing changed, hardened.  Peaked.  And fell, satisfied, into the
even rhythm of sleep.  And I moved to leave.

   *

   I slid through the shadows of her building, safe from view in the
blurring darkness that covers us.  I wasn't invisible, but I wasn't visible
either.  Humans have to want to see us, or we have to want to see them.

   But they can see us.  They know that we're locked in the eternal battle
over territory.  They who feast upon the goodness in the souls of man, and
woman.

   I knew it was there.  I felt it watch me as I left her building.  I
could feel its green glowing eyes hit me between my wings, high on my back.
I kept walking.  If I turned now I would succeed only in moving it away. 
If I waited, waited until it was stalking its victim, I could send it
scurrying away for the rest of the night.  Perhaps longer.

   It was a fine line we walked.  So I moved away, in the direction of my
church.

   They are evil, and they are stupid.  No sooner had I turned the corner
than he was scuttling off, up the building.  I could hear sharp claws
scritch on the stone walls of the building.  His breathing was wet, sloppy,
and lecherous in its desire.

   I turned, silent in the night, and watched.  I saw the amorphous shadow
slither through the infinitesimal cracks between her cross-barred window
and its frame.  And I knew where it was going.  It had seen me, and it was
going to Her.

   It was a blink, less than that moment between awake and sleep, that it
took me to be at her window.  But it was enough.  Long enough for it to be
on her.  On silent feet, almost-cat-paw feet, it had crawled to her bed,
and in her dreaming sleep she had rolled to her back, exposing perfect
breasts to the being's leering gaze.  I watched, helpless, as It nosed
aside the deep 'v' of her gown to bare her pink nipple to the cold air.  It
reached, one claw extended, to scrape across that nub, the button hardening
in the cool air of the room.

   I did what I do.  Wings of stone unfurled as though they were mere silk
to beat against the night air.  Cold granite feathers struck the
windowpane, clinking against the cold steel of the security bars, rapping
incessant to disturb her slumber.  I threw my head back and wailed a
gargoyle's cry, high pitched, anguish-filled.  The call of the crow, the
call of a thousand crows, directed to her ears, aimed to interrupt the
dreams locking her in sleep.

   Then I realized.  She didn't hear me.  I couldn't wake her.  I beat my
wings in frustration and I felt stone from the wall crumble under the
strikes.

   She didn't hear me, but It did.  And It knew.  It knew that I couldn't
interrupt the nighttime ravaging of my night bird.  Shadow took form and
light from the moon glinted off the new fang as it lowered to taste her
flesh.

   My hands balled into fists, and before I could think I struck the
delicate pane, shattering it easily.

   She couldn't hear the jagged crack of the glass as it shattered, but she
could feel the shards as they struck her skin, flung the length of the room
from window to bed.  She started, her eyes flying open, bright and
frightened in the pale light of the moon.

   It sprung into the darkness.  Off of her bed, away from her goodness. 
Hissing in frustration and anger, glaring at me with iced-whiskey eyes.  I
had broken a rule.

   I flew.  As much as I desired her, seeing me would bring her only pain
fear and loathing.  I knew she watched, and I knew she saw something, but I
didn't know how her mind would choose to interpret what she saw.  A bird,
perhaps.  A shadow cast by a cloud across the moon.  But somewhere, in her
heart, she'd know.

   She bore the marks.  Before I flew I saw the thin line drawn over the
swell of her breast.  The scrape left by the wicked fang of the night
being. I knew it would fade quickly, and I knew that she'd feel it much
longer.  Forever perhaps.  At night, when she was frightened, when she was
hyperaware and afraid of something surrounding her, she'd feel it.  It
would burn lightly, a reminder of what she almost lost.

   I flew.  Down the sidewalk, paying no attention to the shadows.  Passing
under the street lamps and hideous neon store signs with abandon.  Back to
my church.  Back to my sanctuary.  Back to my perch.

   *

   She came the next morning.  To the church.  Undoubtedly drawn there by a
need to thank the non-existent saints in whom she placed her misguided
faith.

   As she passed under my watchful gaze she stopped.  Looked up.  Met my
unflinching gaze with hers.  And she knew.  Yes.  Somehow.  In some part of
her.  She knew.

   It was enough.

   *

   "It won't work."

   I was sitting atop my perch, scowling down in a vain attempt to decipher
the illiterate graffiti sprayed in orange paint on the sidewalk below.  The
voice surprised me.

   "What?" We don't talk much.  I haven't had a conversation in years,
decades maybe.  There are only so many things to be said, and then you're
just rehashing old ground.

   "It won't work.  I've seen you.  You're still following her.  You're
attached to her.  Nothing can happen.  Let it go."

   I tried to deny it.  I played dumb, but we both knew that he was right.
It wasn't the first time that one of us had been drawn to a human.  It
doesn't happen often.  Time moves too quickly for us.  We see someone, we
see them grow and age and the seasons pass in a night.

   "You have nothing to offer her.  She has nothing to give you.  You're
drawn to her because she's lonely.  But you're not.  Not really.  You just
think you are.  You think you should be.  It will pass.  Let her go.  Stop
following her before she sees you."

   He was right.  I wasn't lonely.  I wanted to be lonely, but I couldn't.
There's nothing inside stone capable of feeling lonely.

   At least, that's what I could tell myself.

   For now.

   *





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