Broken Statue

Created: 07/12/2006 02:38:01 AM

Last night, crouched in the dark evening, leaning against the window pane, I saw the old man working again. He was sorting through thousands of broken pieces, trying to rebuild a once beautiful statue. The room was covered in heavy white dust, scattered with fragments of plaster and the tools of a sculptor.

Looking closer at the man and his process, it was obvious that he could not have created the statue himself. It must be a second-hand item, or a once prized possession thrown out to the curb. He was a repair man. Working slowly and quietly. No stimuli from the outside world. No helpers. He worked in solitude, in privacy. Alone and in the darkness. This was his secret, hidden away from the neighbors and the children outside.

He worked painstakingly to restore this once beautiful statue to her original glory. Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, he sorted through the broken remains. He had managed to piece a large portion of it back together. Her legs were cracked, but standing. Her torso was stained with dark smudges. The head and arms still missing, lay in pieces throughout the room.

His technique was consistent. He would brush the pieces off and collect all the dust, which he kept in cloth bags below his workbench. The old man kept coughing, billowing out puffs of the white dust taken into his lungs from the long hours of work. Sometimes the coughing would be so bad, he would clumsily drop everything in his hands and stumble over to the corner of the room covering his mouth. His eyes would water and drip down his cheeks as he wiped them with the backs of his hands.

After the fit had calmed down, he would stare at the partly reassembled figure. He would gaze at it for a few minutes, then approach it with a slight curiousness, as if he noticed something that he had overlooked before. Running his fingers along the rough contours, he looked back on some of the fragments on the floor, as if he had found a matching piece.

And he continued on this way. No time for sadness. No time for despair. Working his best to reconstruct that beautiful figure. Knowing within, the hidden promise he had made would come to flower, or drag him down with it. Leaving a broken and tired soul.