Most of us assume that statues stay where we first saw them forever. The first time I noticed Colossus it didn’t even register.
Before then I was always wandering. It happened in phases. When I saw Colossus again and again, again I assumed that it was another kind of conformity. Sculptors laying stake in the latest brand of identity. The landscape didn’t matter, I just wanted to make my way. Focusing gives me migraines. The second time, on that same walk back, I didn’t fully notice it but assumed that I had gone in a circle and doubled back. “I thought I was past that.” The third, and this was a couple of days later and pretty far off in the distance, mind, it was out of place. Where a humble statue in memoriam of some significant ancient stood, seated, a new, gaunt statue weighed. Stones cascading into the scenery behind them, you wouldn’t recognize it as a statue unless you glared at it. I turned around again, each heartbeat thudding into my heels, sending me further away from where I saw the statue again when I realized that the wall alongside the path was jutting miles into the sky, forming legs and chests and arms.
Trying to normalize my pace to avoid attention, muttering “Everything’s fine. Just ignore it.”
I kept seeing them. Sometimes I could have sworn that I saw marble eyes gliding towards me when I spotted Colossus again, larger each time, again decided that it was just a defect drawing dreams in the corner of my eye, down by the crease, not anything worth my time. Plagiarism, repetition, confirmation bias—all sound more reasonable than being followed. I had to stay reasonable.
*********
The bus stank. The windows fogged from the air clogged with the stench of plaque-riddled breath, piss, and sweat. I leaned on the glass, window pulled a full four inches open, closing my eyes, drinking up the intoxicating exhaust, ready for a breath of anything other than the bus’s repulsive drizzle clinging to me from all directions. I’ve been on this bus so many times, it’s plagued me. I can lean out of the window and breathe, at least.
I must have dozed off reveling in my reprieve, or so I thought when the light flickered from the underpass. As I opened my eyes, the bronze wall outside the window reflecting sunlight’s needles into my sight, the bus driver slammed on the brakes. Myself and the driver’s more conscious audience continued travelling out of spite, no matter what was in our way.
Again I opened my eyes, expecting the side of my face to be filled with shards of broken glass, broken-cheeked, ready to see other passengers devastated, but only found another passenger’s and the driver’s eye contact. Looking but not looking until they realized that I was looking back, they took interest in a divide on the panel behind me. The bus slowed to a stop and I stayed on while everyone else got off.
“Last stop.”
“I’m taking it back, I didn’t pay attention and went further than I meant.”
“You gotta buy a pass and take a different bus to get back.”
Midnight would be scattering the day’s ashes on us soon. I was out of money so I left the bus and I stayed.
*************
When I was tired of staying I wandered. Some number of miles fell underfoot until I found my way home.
When the door slammed shut, the small entryway draped a blanket of echoes around my shoulders. I almost fell stumbling forward, rising, haphazardly flinging my head back to counteract the unwieldy mass of planet sucking my center to its smouldering, rotten core. Having broken the lamp that sold demons and obstacles to pillars of light many years ago without fixing it, I briefly found my balance and waded through the black pond toward some inkling of safety, hoping that muscle memory had paid more attention than me.
The death rattle light flinging itself into the infinite chamber of silence that encased the room—it could be infinite—muffled when I found and flicked on the lightswitch. Home. Night plunged and battered the world around, but it can’t touch me when I’m home. All that was left was the memory of what happened before the light hanging in the air, just out of reach.
In exchange for my attention, the light awarded me with the gift of exposing every surface it could reach. Terror drained down my skull and pulsated through my limbs as it dawned on me that nothing had changed. Anxiety rained on homes all around, flooded the community, reigned on minds, maybe like mine. I expected…something when I turned on the light this time. Some kind of infestation, disgusting or disheartening disturbance lingering, waiting for me. Closing and opening my eyes again and again, desperate for something so horrific that it bordered on enlightening, but it was just the same again. All I saw was the same fuc
king room. That fu
cking room, mocking the tranquility of security that shelter brings.
The light was hiding something, something that promised doom and better yet, something new. Disheartened, I jammed my hand, flicking the light on and off, again and again, again waiting to see if the new cadence of darkness and light summoned the secrets into some new kind of anything I can consume. Anything. But again, all I saw was the same room. Nothing had changed this whole time.
I followed through the entrance, both arms spread out for balance as I got closer to the hallway. Going directly down the center, touching both sides, it began to feel as if they were closing in on me. I deflected through the kitchen to the back door, leaving for something new and adjacent to the indoors. The unchanging, oppressive, damning indoors.
When I pulled the back door open there was only stone.
No way to get past the rock face, no gap between stone and wall. In fact, the room felt smaller, there was a sharp warp in the wall from the stone’s obstruction outside. I turned back, nearly stomping from my weary legs. Back to the front.
I wandered back through the room to the entrance, never stopping. Stumbling for what felt like a mile through this tiny room, when I finally saw what looked like the entrance doorway before me, I lifted my head to see Colossus in the doorway.
The air spun a thickness of molasses as I struggled to catch my breath, remembering Colossus always lingering in the background, my lungs filling with sticky sweet stuffy panic that stabbed and pulled at my chest.
Colossus stood on a marble base as high as my chest and was hunched over, back pushing up on the ceiling. The floor was sinking under the weight of Colossus forcing itself upright, the head nearly severed by the pressure from the top. Arms outspread, keeping the door impenetrable.
It seemed so obvious. There was no getting past Colossus. I glanced back toward the hallway and it wasn’t much better. Still unrelentingly similar. My fate of being trapped in this reprieve wrapped its arms around me and squeezed until my pulse quickened and my skull began to throb.
I had to get out at all costs.
*********
Colossus never looked at me when it was obvious. I would catch glances from the corner of my eye as I paced back and forth, plotting. If I could just remove the arms I could escape, but the base held the statue together. Taking the path of least resistance, I attacked the base with any object I could find. I bashed every book on my shelf on the base until they were torn to shreds, threw coins at it, broke my typewriter to bits, ruined every device, speaker, and screen of my entertainment system pounding it on the base again and again. The marble’s sheen smirked, unfazed.
Thinking more, Colossus waiting, I inspected the base for weak spots when I noticed the chain locking Colossus to the marble. Colossus may have been keeping me in, but it seemed like it was just as trapped between what supported it and the ceiling above.
I almost began to feel sorry for Colossus before going back through the home, looking for something that could break the base. Aimlessly dithering through the hallway, on the right I noticed a closet so infrequently used that I had forgotten about it. The door clung to the frame and groaned as I pulled it open to find an old shotgun and a loose collection of birdshot shells scattered on the ground of the closet. I loaded the gun and pocketed the shells.
I raced back to the front door, my pulse surging and the sweat from my hands running down the barrel. With no hesitation, I aimed the shotgun down the hall and fired directly at the center of Colossus’s marble base. Reload. Fire. Reload. Fire.
Putting the shotgun on the shelf where my books once laid, I went closer to see if it helped at all. In any case, I had nine shells left and knew that at least five of them would work as expected. I rubbed my hand on the pockmarked marble base, bits crumbling off into my palm. The birdshot was wearing it down. It was working.
I stepped back again and reloaded. All nine shells dutifully launched upon command. Particulate debris slowly sifted through my field of vision as I checked the progress. The base was severely disfigured, but still intact. Still, the birdshot had chipped away a good deal of marble, the fringes having long fallen from the platform. I grabbed a sharp fragment of the fallen edges and inserted it into a crack that had emerged right where the chain met the platform. Using the butt of the shotgun, I drove the piece deeper and deeper into the base. Finally, the base divided.
Marble shards on the floor slowly began to rattle and spin and the walls began to shift and saunter as the earth quaked. The base shifted beneath Colossus’s weight and Colossus almost seemed to hesitate before falling forward, directly onto me.
************
I awoke under the weight of Colossus’s arms, shivering in cold sweat. Wheezing, I pushed the arm until it rolled off of me, sending knives into my chest once the compression was released. I looked over to where Colossus once stood to see that the base had entirely disintegrated.
A path of ruin and stone littered the walkway from where the base once stood and led to the head, which was the only part of Colossus that stayed intact apart from what was left of its arms. Mouth open in declaration to give way to a jade beard running up the length of its cheek neighbouring Colossus’s stern, confident eyes. As I was taking one last look, Colossus blinked.
Primal, uncanny panic took control of my body as I pulled the gun from the ruin and began attacking the head with the sturdy shotgun base. Each hit rattled the gunframe and bruised my palms. I mindlessly kept hammering away where the head once was, now more fragmented and crushed as the base.
My rhythm slowed as I began to fatigue, burning red hot, my headache coming back, needles reminding me of the depth of every one of my breaths. I turned, brushed aside the debris in the doorway and pulled it open. I’d done it. I’d escaped. I was really free.
I wandered out into the street with the cool early morning air nipping and scraping my skin. Serene. I carefully topped my shallow lungs with this fresh air, winds that promised change. Some chaos, but change nonetheless.
I crumpled under the first shockwave that rolled across the asphalt. I looked back at my doorway, still ajar, where I left the ruins of Colossus and where they will stay—I wasn’t going back. I saw the second shockwave rippling before me and braced myself.
The ground rollicked and sent me backwards before I caught myself. I could see how the shockwaves were starting to drive cracks into the walls of buildings. A geyser violently jettisoned from the sky down to where a hydrant once sat, waiting for crisis. When seeing how high the fountain rose, I saw what was causing the shockwaves.
Miles high and nary a few blocks from where I stood sat a set of eyes burning livid, looking right at me. Colossus, more gargantuan than ever, towered and took another step. Seconds later the third shockwave whipped me from the street. The hydrant rained down, soaking me and flooding the streets as Colossus kept coming.
I started back inside, the doorway still filled with marble dust and fragments. A fourth shockwave attacked the home’s frame and it gave way. A pathetic shambling heap where my home, my fortress, once held me.
Homes around had begun to collapse too, some as in despair as mine while others seemed to collapse in all but the hallway extending from the doorframe, as if held up by something inside.
Earthquake footsteps continued to pummel the ground, buildings, the people in their sleep. Colossus, still striding, crushing and killing everything in its wake, seemingly barely moved toward me in all of this time. The seconds between the steps—silent where they should be thundering—and quakes told me that Colossus was even bigger than I had thought. Now that I’d destroyed what was keeping me inside, there was nothing in Colossus’s way. I could run, but at that size and with no place to hide, any escape would be thwarted in no time. I could go back, but it’d take means and could only happen in a different space. Things I don’t have. There was just no escape. I laid down on the cracked asphalt and waited, closing my eyes shut, desperately trying to turn the violent shakes into soothing cradle sways.
Creative Writing Competition 2020 (Voting)
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