The Stone Angel The smell of wet earth and general dank filled her nostrils. The sky had only just finished its weeping. The stones jutted up from the ground like manmade stalagmites. On each was a name. Bronbrowski, Iella, Vicruze. Their achievements were declared in sharp, carved letters. Honorable father, avid gardener, beloved sister. A roll of thunder rumbled over the trees in the east. The wind shifted through the grass, whispering to the stones in words incomprehensible to humans. The carefully cut lumps of granite, marble, and limestone stood silent in response. And in the center of the cemetery, the stone angel sat. Her dainty, feminine figure sat rigidly on the pedestal on which she was carved. Her long hair fell in soft waves over her shoulders and bosom, her head dipped slightly in the perfect position of quiet contemplation. Her small hands settled, gently folded, in her cold lap. Long robes with deep folds covered her form, falling down over her legs, though at the bottom, her perfect, bare feet were crossed and pointed toward the wet soil. Bursting forth from her shoulders, a pair of enormous feathered wings spread outward. The massive wings curved around the angel slightly as though to protect her from a winter’s chill. She was a beautiful statue. Each feather had been carved and chiseled with the precision of a master. Her features had been set in the vision of a true artist. Every detail hailed the fine hands from which she had been wrought. The tiny wrinkles around her fingers to give them a more humanlike quality were offset perfectly by the smooth youthfulness of her symmetrical face. Her pleasant figure maintained a sense of modesty under the careful folds of her robe. Perhaps worthy of the most praise and wonder, however, were her perfect eyes – fully open and unlike the gaze of any of the other smaller statues in the cemetery. Her thick eyelashes provided a perch for a few droplets of rainwater tears. Completely empty, those eyes still somehow seemed to give her the flickering of #life. But that beauty had finally begun to fade. Lichens crawled up her pedestal and began to cling to her toes and calves, dotting the bottom of her robe in a pattern her maker had never intended. The tip of her left wing had crumbled away after many years of snow melting and freezing in a tiny crack that had grown larger with each passing year of agony. The year of the tornado had sent a large branch crashing into her, scarring her perfect cheek. And in her lap, a mating pair of birds had chosen to build their nest. This angel had seen the comings and goings of countless humans rife with grief. She had seen mothers cry for children who never fully experienced the #life they gave and sons openly weep for the fathers who they weren’t ready to part with. She had seen men return wives to the earth from which they came. She had seen the look of wonder in the eyes of schoolgirls who came to sing in mourning choirs and the footprints of teenage boys who had trespassed in this sacred space to drink secret, stolen booze. She had seen young ones grow up year after year as they returned to lay flowers at the markers of their loved ones. She had seen the grasses grow tall and be cut back down. She had seen old trees wither and fall and seedlings spring skyward. This coming and going of #life was all the angel knew. The night the vandals came was one she had anticipated for many years. She had seen how the cruel young humans had smashed the smaller angels, and sometimes even the headstones from centuries long gone by. She had watched them kick over other statues, shake cans of aerosol paints and cover up the work of the fine artists who had poured their souls into their work. But they had always left her be. Perhaps she was too large, too intimidating. Or perhaps they just never thought they’d have enough strength to do her in. The angel watched generations of them pass her by. But she knew deep inside her that someday they would come for her. The boys wore dark clothing and came through the headstones like shadows in the forest. A chill hung on the air after the day’s earlier rain. The muffled clunk of the spray-paint bottles bounced around the stone monuments as they warned each other to be quiet. Their voices were the hissing serpents in the grass. The sledgehammer found her wings first, sending a massive crack through her back and shoulder. The boys laughed and shook up the bottles, sending lines of red and blue over her perfectly shaped robes. The lines mixed into purple as they shifted over the nest in her lap. The blows kept coming as the puffed up teenagers egged each other on more earnestly. Her neck cracked and her bowed head tumbled back down her wings. They laughed at the carnage. They ground her feet into dust and sent her wings tumbling in countless fragments and chunks of jagged marble. A beam of moonlight broke through the overcast sky, illuminating the murder scene. The grass around her pedestal was coated in a thick coating of finely powdered marble. Slabs of her once perfectly carved robes were slick with the viscous spraypaints. As the boys sat around and drank the beer they had snuck with, it began to rain again. They shouted at each other and ran back to their cars, hands over their heads to avoid the rapidly increasing torrent. The rain sent little streams of tears down the angel’s disembodied face. The little nest had tumbled from its perch in her lap. Two of the eggs had been crushed by the wonton sledgehammer or a flying slice of stone. In the earth that was rapidly shifting to slick mud, a large raindrop sent a wet splatter over the shell of the last egg. A flash of lightning cast a harsh light over the little vessel, illuminating the tiniest fracture in its speckled skin. A little yellow beak poked through the shell.