The names, characters, places and events in this story are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. All characters are over the age of 18. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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BRAZEN STATUES.
Flying through the night time ether he felt more tired than he should. That is what being confined inside a bottle for a hundred years does to you, he thought. It wears out your psychic strength. Giving in to his weariness his spirit swooped downwards looking for a place to rest up for a while when he noticed a pleasant little urban park beneath him. Although he didn't need to, as he could have rested anywhere, he alighted and settled onto an empty bench. Within a few minutes a blue smoky form emerged from out of the cold late October air. He shivered.
Night came early this time of the year and it was full dark. However, like a cat, he had excellent night vision and the dim light was no problem. He settled back against the bench and took in his surroundings. It was a pocket park over the road from an ornate nineteenth century courthouse with an old Civil War howitzer sited by the steps. Rows of elaborately carved pumpkins ran up the steps. A road ran between the courthouse and the park but at this time of night there was little traffic. As he watched only one car drove past, a mom taking her children back from trick or treating. Once the car passed, near silence fell. The only sounds he could hear were a bunch of teens celebrating Halloween by making out at the far end of the park.
He breathed in deeply, taking in the pleasant fall scents of rainfall, wet grass with a distant whiff of wood smoke. He looked around the park and saw that he had settled on a bench next to a rectangular pond. Several ducks lay sleeping on the grass with their heads under their wings, undisturbed by his smoky form materializing out of thin air. At either end of the pond he noticed a bronze statue up on a marble plinth. More pumpkins surrounded both plinths. The first statue was what he presumed was meant to be a nymph. It was of a pretty young woman holding a large vase or pitcher on her shoulder up by her head. Her curly hair was fashioned in what looked like a French braid. One small, pert breast was bare while the other was concealed by what was meant to be a gauzy robe that draped over her breast and down over one leg, strategically covering her privates, but leaving her shins and feet bare.
The other statue depicted a comely Greek youth, probably a shepherd, completely naked except for a fig leaf that covered his groin and a scarf. How the fig leaf was meant to stay in place wasn't explained but was obviously there because of Victorian sensibilities. However, the orange scarf was evidently some student's idea of a Halloween jape. He had short, curly hair and was playing pan pipes.
He reckoned the park and statues had been placed there by a proud town as part of the fin de siècle movement to beautify their city around the turn of the last century. Undoubtedly the park had fallen on hard times in the past with endless rounds of budget cuts but he thought that groups of proud locals must have since reclaimed it from urban decay because the park looked well kept and tidy. The only neglect he could see was the amount of pigeon droppings covering the statues' heads and shoulders.
With a start, he was jerked out of his reverie when the courthouse clock struck eleven. He shook himself but did not feel like resuming his long journey home just yet. He smiled to himself. It seemed such a shame that these two young, beautiful virtually naked people should have been cast gazing at each other for over a century without being able to properly meet or do anything. All they had done was to stare over the pond at each other's nearly naked bodies without being able to speak, to touch each other, to hold each other or to do what comes naturally to two such young attractive people.
With that, he made a personal wish. For a moment nothing happened. The two statues remained cold, dead, and lifeless. The bronze stayed hard and a dark weathered brown. Then a lick of flesh appeared at their feet. First their toes became warm and pink, then their feet and ankles, then rapidly up their calves and thighs before spreading like wildfire up and across their bellies, their chests. Warm flesh spread even more quickly up their necks, across their shoulders and along their slim arms and into their hands. But it was their heads and faces that held his attention. Gone were their immovable expressions of sad yearning as their lips reddened and they yawned and stretched. An instant later, their sculpted guano covered hair disappeared to be replaced by the soft waves of their own natural hair. He noticed that the youth was blond while the nymph had dark hair.
They yawned and looked about with bewilderment.
"That is so heavy," said the nymph putting down her water filled pitcher and rolling her shoulders to ease her aches. "To think I've been holding that thing for year after year."
"I'm lucky," said the shepherd. "All I've had is these pipes."
The pair carefully climbed down from their plinths and stepped over the assembled pumpkins. He noticed that the youth's fig leaf had dropped to the ground and lay unheeded by the gourds. However, the nymph clutched her wisp of gauze tightly around her body but it did little to conceal her maidenly charms as her small breasts bounced delightfully as she hurried around the edge of the pond to greet the youth. In the chill night air her rosy nipples stuck out discretely in the manner of an old oil painting.
They were directly opposite his bench when they noticed him sitting there.
"Sir, did you do this?" the nymph inquired timorously.
