Statues
by Steve Gergley
It was just before eight on a hot Tuesday in July and I was driving to work past the farms and fields on Grove. I felt like shit like always and I couldn’t deal with customers and coupons today, so I pulled onto the side of the road in front of an old abandoned barn, squatting beside an eighty-foot oak which stood near a beautiful rolling field cleaved by a collapsing wooden fence. With gold sunlight warming my face, I walked behind the barn and called Kyoko on her cell. For an hour we sat in the prickly grass and listened to the cicadas buzzing in the heat. Everything was calm. The world was peaceful. And for the first time in months, I was happy. But then the sky turned white and the cicadas went silent and glittering gray snow started falling from the sky. Without a word Kyoko squeezed my hand and let me know it was time to leave. As we jogged back to our cars, I watched the gray snowflakes slicing through the still air, glinting in the milky light, spinning like tiny sawblades.
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When the earth shook beneath us and the black smoke churned into the sky and the falling ash swallowed the sun, me and Kyoko emptied the food from the fridge and closed ourselves off in the basement. Looking up at the narrow window near the ceiling, we pressed our phones to the grimy glass and filmed our neighbors as they streamed into the street like ants. Their eyes were glued to their phones; their faces were blank and distracted; their fingers flicked endlessly to the sky. When the pyroclastic flow mummified us moments later, these are the statues we became.
Steve Gergley is a writer and runner from Warwick, New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, Hobart, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Barren Magazine, and others. In addition to writing fiction, he has composed and recorded five albums of original music. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/
