It was a decrepit thing, left to the whims of that snaking undergrowth, a dark figure waiting in the dead woods of the quiet forest.
It is Auntie.
Or, to speak plainly, it was the statue under which was buried the person my uncle claimed was my true mother. Nobody can verify that claim for me; and it's useless, really. It isn't a practical thing to make a habit out of returning to this sordid, dim patch of dirt every month or so to pay respects to an unfeeling remnant of "family," when you can barely tread the road from the village to Eylnoi without being accosted by any enterprising band of thieves or pillagers—much less the road going to that horrible patch of forest land.
But it is for this same exact impracticality that I go here anyway, because nobody in their right mind would go here without reason, and inadvertently stumble on my hidden sanctuary—yes, a true hideout. A pile of felled logs and straw that I lashed and chopped and thatched into a very cozy respite inside, and furnished with… canned corn and mushrooms, I guess.
As I regard the statue and the plot of dirt it stewards, I remember the echo of the unease I felt as a little kid, coming here by myself for the first time. The grave is marked by a bed of ugly, sooty pebbles, and is otherwise utterly unremarkable.
But Auntie?
Auntie looks worse for wear every year, yet seemingly her structure has held as firmly as if she were newly sculpted. Whatever pretensions the artist had for fashioning an angel out of copper have long been made a laughingstock by the elements—its patina is not so much a teal-y verdigris anymore as it is pond scum black, scarring every surface, as if it were grime and not acid rain that ate away at her dress, her hair, her missing swathe of left bicep and hip. The metallic runoff smudged her face in brutish streaks: like wet kohl smeared on as a form of humiliation, turned into waterfalls by her tears.
But I said my good-evenings to her, and before entering my little abode, I paid my respects.
Wide bristle brush, and a toothbrush. A far-too-old T-shirt, as a rag — I brought three. I step to the platform.
Like a lunatic, I coo "my goodness, you look awful" and "let's be easy with your dress" and "tsk, tsk, that's more flaking than I expected" to the inanimate piece of rock as I dust it off and give its surface a good wash. I put on gloves that are already pitch-black with the detritus from her patina, and have to put on new ones a couple of times. I mostly attend to its face—stars, it's pitiful; my mind flashing to dressing an old friend's scars after we rescued her upper body from a Venus elkbane the size of a house. If I squint, I can fill in the missing contours of her ashen-grey cheekbone, slender nose, and slight lips that once might have made a beautiful face.
After the face, I clean and polish the rest of the body, starting with her tatters of a dress. Despite being made of metal, Auntie looks like she was immolated. The black morass of her crumbling surface looks like char. It's eaten through her limbs; her chest is half-hollow. But most pathetically—the wings. One still spread outward, the structure gnarled and blackened so much it looked like a piece of dried bramble than an organ of flight. The other one was, politely, a nub with the little sprigs of its wire armature sticking out.
This was no longer a statue of an angel whose hands resting on the pommel of her sword implied a sentinel or a guardian. Clad in grime, this was a sickly waif, leaning on her rusted weapon like a cane. As if the world chewed up a piece of heaven and spat it back out.
I know nothing about how this statue came to rest in these woods, since there aren't any tombstones or elsewise to suggest it was once a graveyard. I only know my uncle thought it a good marker in front of which he buried the carcass. Whether it was cursed, or possessed, or perhaps a guardian to some secret in this forest, I never knew. It had always been inert, but in being so, it became familiar. Safe. Even welcoming.
As my face looks up to meet the vestiges of hers, my hand holding the wet rag against her singed collarbone, I feel a pang of wistfulness. Yes, even welcoming.
I don't really have a clue why I made it a habit to clean Auntie each time I visit. It seems… filial? For somebody who never subscribed to the notion of found family, or family at all, it seems like a concept I'd laugh at, but it's strange. Or maybe plain human nature. Like doing something nice for someone, or something, tricks your brain to be favorable to them over time.
A light rain falls on us, helping remove the last layers of suds from the soapy washrag. It might be acidic rain, but for the moment, the raindrops that catch the mild afternoon sunlight make this angel glisten. Little dim-shining stars, gleaming over her black scabs and traces of teal skin.
I dab her face with a dry rag, then drape a bit of canvas over the entire statue to shield it from the rest of the rain.
Then, my little hideout. A supper of corn and beans and puffballs foraged from a nearby patch. Not long after that, I drift to sleep.
Despite everything, I dream of Auntie. I imagine the kind of place she belonged to before the world ended. Did she guard a mausoleum? A royal palace? Did people stop to look at her when she was in her perfect, gilded state? Were children scared of her and her sword, cautious if she could move and strike?
I dream of the world she was created in, more vivid than what the anemic projector would display in the monthly picture shows at the town hall. When sculptures weren't made of mud or clay, but metal. When so many things were metal and lit up and talked to you, or so they say.
And as I feel them make my foot itch, I dream of not needing mosquito nets.
It's another still night at the forest. The moon is full, and casts the trees and little patches of the grassy ground in soft silver. Somehow Auntie makes me feel safer than seeing the nightly militia patrols around the village. It's just a damn statue, but I find its company preferable to people. Messy, capricious, untrustworthy people.
By the time I felt my feet take me outside, barely-conscious, to do god-knows-what against the band of strangers digging up that plot of dirt my so-called mother was buried in, I almost chuckled—realizing I was about to get more offended of this intrusion on the statue's behalf than for them trying to desecrate that grave. Hell, I got even angrier that they took off that canvas sheet covering it from the rain.
I felt thick arms loop around mine, and throw me into the dirt. Next moment of lucidity: pain singing a song in my guts, limbs free but the cool kiss of a gun barrel to my temple wakes me up like a bucket of cold water.
"We don't want to kill you," lied the man. "We swore that much to your dear ol' uncle." I'm sorry, are we acquainted?
I watched as they withdrew the dregs of what was once a human being out from the earth. They tore off its clothes, sliced open the torso. Greedy hands impetuously digging through the dried black vellum of worm-bitten meat to retrieve…
Well, fuck if I know. And by the looks of their faces as they pulled out a tiny pouch seemingly snuck into the viscera, neither did they.
"Does this look like something of value to you?" Their ringleader hissed, sinking two fingers into the pouch and holding them up to reveal them daubed in something black like soot or coal dust, or hopefully fast-acting anthrax.
Fast-acting like the way I heard the hammer being pulled back, and the cold kiss once more against my head. Shouting, angry, filled the air, and they shoved me against a tree trunk, heavy jackboot on my chest. I registered, I think, that they were asking me where my uncle's treasure was, and amid the flurry of invective the ringleader erupted into red fire, as his armor began to char black from the sword-tip that emerged from his midsection.
Immediately after that was the messy bisection of the grunt to his side, split at the waist by a perilously fast sheet of glinting steel that I recognized as a wing. Just the one wing. Smoldering in crimson flame.
Then came a dance of smoke and torchlight, as the sword swung in bright arcs, and I knew it struck true when I smelled an undeniable scent of cooked meat. Briefly, I heard sizzling, as arterial blood boiled on its way to nourish a head that was no longer attached to its body. My ears rang in pain, and I realized it was from the screaming from the last few graverobbers as the sword was sunk into the mud and grime-scabbed hands grabbed their heads to dash them against Auntie's pedestal.
When quiet had settled into harmony with the handful of campfires that happily roared from the graverobbers' charring bodies, I saw Auntie. I knew it was her, even as her entire form burned like an inferno.
Naturally, petrified, I did not have a plan in mind when she walked approaching me, and had not the decency to conceal my trembling when she stooped down to look at me with the dark, sunken voids where her eyes used to be. The flames covering her body had died so suddenly, I didn't even notice.
There, my view backlit by burning corpses, I found my eyes irretrievably fixated on Auntie's black-scabbed visage—the patina sloughing off in earnest like she was crying slow rivers of lahar. She was close enough for the residual heat to hurt. I would have run. Instead, I continued to sit against the bark as she reached from her scabbard side, and, tenderly, took out the last clean rag I brought with me, and with an arm that was falling apart, she began to wipe off the grime from my face.
Afterward, for the first time in our shared history together, Auntie did something that genuinely frightened me.
She smiled.
It was not a big or beaming grin, but something delicate, made grotesque only because of the sheer decrepitude she had suffered through.
And perhaps it all caught up to her by then, because a moment after her jaw clattered onto the dirt, she slumped forward.
The angel fell to the ground beside me, midway between charred corpse and industrial wreckage.
Yes, I buried her. Because it really was filial, in the end. I collected as much of the scrap and soot she dislodged from her massacre last night, and put it together with her body as best as I could.
I laid her all down in the canvas sheet and wrapped it, and with a little ropework, sank her earthward into a grave right beside the one she protected all this time.
It was all done by early afternoon, and just then, right as I thought about how there was nothing to take Auntie's place as a marker for her own grave, I felt the sting of acid rain on my nape, noticing the empty space where they once met an angel, and I did something that also genuinely frightened me.
I sniveled. Sobbed, openly. Cried like it was an injustice.
I wish I could say I cried only briefly, but perhaps I had been keeping far more inside than I had acknowledged. My recollections of last night swirled round and round, trying to allow myself to understand what Auntie meant by her final actions, by her sparing me. But I didn't want to act stupid for too long. It is plain human nature, after all, that to do something nice for someone is to trick your brain to be favorable to them over time.
Maybe that was in Auntie's nature, too.
As for the graverobbers, well, I'm sure that field of puffballs would repay me with a bigger harvest the next time I come around.
After all, we always have to make time for family.
