The Sculpture Garden

It was natural for Sheri to think that she was being watched. She was paranoid around people she couldn't see; it was common for strange eyes to examine her with a surgical precision, coming from the sidewalks and the windows of the offices around her, the scaffolds hanging delicately from the tips of skyscrapers and the steam pouring from the open manhole covers in the streets. She would walk quickly to avoid being scandalized, marked by threats that she was certain existed, trying to hurry away the sinister claustrophobia of the daytime.

Sheri took a deep breath and walked faster. It was cold, so she clenched her fists inside the pockets of her overcoat. Her paranoia compelled her to glance over her shoulders to see whether she was being followed, but she ignored the urges because she didn't want anyone to know she was aware of their presence. She needed to find a place to stay before it got dark; she didn't want to sleep on the streets again. Sheri hunched her shoulders up to her neck, straightened the collar on her coat, and sped her pace.

Sheri looked at her feet when she walked, and thought about home. As she absent-mindedly hurried down the sidewalk, the city throbbed around her like a machine. The people came and went, the stores opened and closed, the taxis whizzed by, and Sheri tore through this hostile metropolis that paradoxically branded her with anonymity and goaded her terrible lunacy with fantasies of persecution.

Sheri was insane. Not in a violent way; just in a way that made her mumble to herself about nothing, see things that weren't there, sleep on the streets instead of in the shelters, and bother the sane people who preferred to go about their daily business of ignoring people like her. She would imagine monsters in the alleyways. She would see gargoyles in the steel and glass faces in the buildings. She would watch strangers as she imagined them watching her, their faces twisting into horrible parodies of human beings and their bodies winding like serpents. But the great irony in her life was that she was so afraid of being followed, while everyone was actually going out of their ways to avoid her.

Sheri quickly turned around a corner onto a main street, her eyes on her feet and her hands still tight within her overcoat.

What made everything worse was that she wasn't from here. Sheri had hitchhiked to the city about five years earlier from the country to find a lover. She found one, and loved him ecstatically, but she was sick with a degenerative mental illness she wasn't aware of, and when her behavior became erratic her lover threw her out onto the street, leaving her homeless and afraid. She had a youthful beauty about her which was once incomparable but now hidden behind five years of filth, masked by the torment of living for half a decade without a home. Her long, brownish hair was tied back into a sloppy braid, making her look younger than she was. She was twenty-five, but she could have been easily mistaken for a runaway or an orphan.

She would often think about her lover. She would think about the melting feeling she had when he ran his hands over her arms and outside of her hips, she would think about the way he would kiss between her breasts and over her belly button, she would think about that wonderful sensation she would have when he first entered her, and the gasping noise she would make. She would think about the way he would always find that tiny spot within her, making the small hairs over her spine rise from the static, making her body stiff from the sheer pleasure he mercilessly mixed inside of her, making her cry in time with the energy, making her come, and finally making her collapse from a satisfaction that was no less than perfect. She remembered falling asleep beside him, still wet from the excitement of their lovemaking, shattered to pieces by the way he exhausted her. Just thinking about things like this made her terribly excited.

But that was a long time ago. Sex and pleasure were now as distant as the country, as distant as her childhood, and as distant as the sanity that she could hardly remember. Right now, all she needed was shelter.

She blindly turned around another corner to a side street and collided with something large. She fell to the ground. In a daze, she lifted her head, and saw a man dressed in a ruffled business suit sitting knees up and hands down on the concrete. The man shook his head and stood straight, grabbing the briefcase that he dropped during the collision.

"Watch where you're going, Christ!" The man said, and brushed himself off. "Fucking bag lady."

Sheri stayed on the ground for a moment, and then stood up. She gazed coldly into the man's eyes, and he gazed back, and she abruptly ran as fast as she could, through the thin crowd of people casually taking their time down the small street, through the warm late-evening air, through the forest of buildings and taxis enclosing her, through the alleys and the side streets and the noiseless steel and glass gargoyles that cut through her like a bread knife. She ran between dark corridors, past dumpsters and the bodies of sleeping homeless men. She watched the city flow around her like water, and she fled deeper and deeper into a timeworn place that had been forgotten and abandoned long ago. As the sun was swallowed up by the horizon and the nighttime began, Sheri kept on running. She was absolutely terrified. She needed to run away and hide from the eyes that followed her everywhere. She needed a safe place.

When Sheri came to what seemed like a sanctuary, she stopped, kneeled over, and caught her breath. She was dizzy and tired, and when she began examining her surroundings she realized she was somewhere completely unfamiliar. The sound of honking taxis and strangers on the streets was still present, but it was very distant, and Sheri felt somewhat comfortable in this place, where it was curiously more humid than anywhere else in the city. She was in a dim alleyway with no doors or windows. The walls were wet from the moisture in the air, and as she walked further down the corridor Sheri lost track of where everything began and where it ended. She walked with her arms stretched, her fingers tracing lines in the moisture clinging to the walls. As narrow as the passageway was, she did not feel claustrophobic, and the deeper inside she went, the more comfortable she became. Sheri felt like she had found an island in the city, where the white noise of the streets dimmed into silence.

If it weren't for her right finger, stained black from the mixture of dirt and water on the wall, she wouldn't have found the ancient doorway on the side, obscured in the darkness. Sheri turned, narrowed her eyes, and saw the old, wooden door, lined with iron, with a small knob immediately in the center.

She knocked, and drew back nervously. Nobody answered. Grabbing the knob, she pushed the door forward, and with a little bit of resistance it creaked open. Sheri stood there with her eyes wide, breathless, amazed by what she found.

Inside the room, miraculously well-lit by one small, thin candle hanging from the ceiling, was an enormous sculpture garden, lined from floor to ceiling with trees, rose bushes, colored flowers, myrtles and belladonna. There were vines crawling up the walls and falling to the ground. Tulips pushed their way through the dirt floor. Nightshade was peeking through the cracks in the walls. The ground was littered with poppies, carobs and pomegranate seeds. And between the countless plants, herbs and flowers that colored the room with such a fragrant, living smell, were dozens of life-size marble sculptures, beautiful, perfect sculptures. They were all women, and they were all nude, some of them were sleeping, some of them crying out in pleasure or pain, all of them were awe-inspiringly constructed by a delicate, precise hand, cut to the most intimate level of detail, as if carved from the marble by God himself. In her first moment of clarity in over five years, Sheri doubted her sanity. Something like this could not possibly exist inside of the same dirty, chaotic city she was never able to become familiar with.

"Hello?" She said to no one in particular.

She walked inside, and felt pomegranate seeds crunching underneath her sneakers. As soon as she entered, she realized that the room was terribly humid, to the point where she automatically broke out in a sweat and had to wipe the moisture from her forehead. She stepped carefully, admiring the statues that littered the ground with the carobs and the pomegranates, sometimes stopping to run her hand over their cold, threadlike hair or incredibly lifelike breasts. Every touch chilled her, sending a familiar, sensual feeling through her body, which was made all the more worse by the overbearing humidity. She was so fascinated with the statues, and with the feelings within her body, that she almost bruised herself on the large, male statue that stood like a boulder in the center of the sculpture garden.

“Oh God,” Sheri squeaked.

He was tall, at least six feet tall, and like the other statues was completely nude. He held his arms stretched out to his sides, the hands enclosed in fists, and stared off into a dimension that Sheri, even in all her insanity, could not find. She felt his arms, so thick and so lifelike, and drew her hand over his chest, along his sides, and along his solid but flaccid penis. She ran her hand down the side of the statue, and between the humidity and the intense sexuality that she sensed in the room, felt so strongly aroused. As she groped the statue and sweated alone with her audience, she instinctively began touching herself, and felt increasingly comfortable as she ran her hands along the marble person in front of her.

The humidity was too much. Sheri pulled her shirt over her head, and threw it to the side, mixing with the seeds and dead leaves that littered the ground. She sat down, her back against the base of a stone woman, and pulled down her pants, which had been sticking to her like leather. Now she was wearing nothing, and she gazed up at the man above her, who was still looking off into nothing, his hands static by his sides.

Sheri began touching herself again. With her head to the side and her eyes closed, her hands went up and down the front of her body, which at this moment (and every moment) was unbelievably beautiful, her knees up and her legs spread, her breasts delicately erect. She could imagine the hands of her lover tracing the contours of her body, his mouth around her nipple, her moaning, his hands between her thighs, where her hands were now, softly rubbing her pussy and sending those wonderful pulses through her body. Her toes curled and stretched as she began to rub a little harder, the moisture in the air mixing with the moisture coming from within her, the smell of the flowers and the plants mixing with the smell of her sex. She looked so beautiful, and she felt so erotic.

“Fuck me,” Sheri moaned to no one, and her breathing intensified.

It was wonderful. She could feel her finger roaming around her pussy, throughout every nerve in her body. She began to melt from the sheer pleasure she was giving herself, her hand beating out a steady rhythm over the folds of her own flesh, gradually becoming covered in her own juices. Her eyes began to open as she masturbated faster. It was so good, the humidity in the air making her body glimmer with sweat, the leaves and flowers under her bare back, tempering the heat that she was building within, forcing her to fuck herself harder. And as she could feel herself beginning to climax, quickly inserting a finger inside of herself and pulling it out, pushing it in and pulling it out, prolonging the intensity, she could hear the statues quietly whispering to each other, the white noise of the city now gone entirely, so that there was nothing left except for the chatter of the statues and the accelerating sounds of her moaning.

It was when her eyes were rolling back into her head, her finger thrusting furiously in and out, her free hand massaging her tit, when she noticed the marble man staring down at her. Between the humidity, the insanity, and her overwhelming desire, she could not tell if it was real, but when she exploded with her first orgasm, dripping to the ground and erasing the questions from her body, she did not care that the marble man was slowly climbing down from his pedestal, bending down between her spread legs, his marble body creaking from ages without motion, kissing her full on the lips, his hands around her shivering waist, his fully erect penis effortlessly pushing inside of her, intensifying her already earth-shattering orgasm and bringing her gratification to a whole different plateau. She felt ridiculously high as the statute began fucking her, and she could do nothing to stop him. Her hands were tight around his back, her fingernails somehow digging inside what was made of stone, but felt so flesh-like. Her orgasm did not stop, and she cried out as the pleasure ripped through her, climax after climax, moan after moan. And when she didn’t think she could feel any better, when she didn’t think the sensations within her body could get any more intense, she had one more orgasm which shattered her, making her scream, making her pussy tighten around the stone man’s penis, who moaned along as he thrusted deeper and emptied himself inside of her. As she cried from the unbelievable pleasure that the statue delivered to her frail body, as she cried out from the throbs of uncut pleasure that forced her to close her eyes and spasm around his solid manhood, she could feel his come firing deep within her, spreading to each of her forgotten parts and easing her out of the most intense peak she would ever have. She kept breathing heavily after the stone man lifted himself off of her, and she sat still, still shaking from the ecstasy oozing out of her, languidly fingering herself, trying to savor whatever pleasure was left in her body. Sheri had never felt so good. The proof lay in the puddle below her.

She smiled as the marble man, again flaccid, climbed back on his pedestal, looked up, and brought his hands back to his sides.

And as the sweat dripped off of her, her finger gently rubbing, she could feel his love spreading inside of her, from the center of her womanhood, to her stomach, to her knees and elbows, to her fingers and her toes.

As she fell asleep, above the leaves and the flowers and the pomegranates, she dreamt of the statues around her, whispering quietly.

She could feel the stone inching through her body, beginning where the statue exhausted itself. She could feel herself becoming rock, falling deeper into her sleep, peaceful and quiet.

Until finally Sheri was still, her body a piece of marble, her face looking towards the sky, her hands limp to her sides, another sculpture in the garden.