Plague of Statues

Mark was in bed reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being when he heard a strange noise in the living room where his wife was watching television. It was a thud and rattle like a head of cabbage dropped onto a plate. Absorbed in his reading, he did not go to investigate.

In the living room, his wife was dead. She was in a strange posture, on her hands and knees on the floor with her head resting on the clear glass top of the coffee table, her eyes open, still seeing.

When he finished the chapter he was reading, Mark walked down the carpeted hall to the living room. When he saw his wife, he knew she was dead. He reached forward timidly to touch her cold cheek, then stiffly backed away a few paces, as though frightened that the death in the room might leap from her to him. Then he just stood there a long time, unable to move. He thought he should call an ambulance. But he knew the ambulance would be no use. There would be a funeral. There would be a walk to the graveyard behind the coffin, and the miserable business of adjusting to living alone in the empty house. All that would happen, but first he really should call an ambulance.

Then he noticed the floor was falling away from his toes; then he felt his shoulders resting against the wall behind him, his gaze locked on the upper left-hand corner of the living room where dusty cobwebs had been forgotten even by the spiders. Almost before he realized he was dead, he was propped against the wall like a statue shaken off its pedestal by an earthquake.

All over town, and all over the world, people fell over stiff as pokers, death catching them in some of the most undignified postures imaginable.

The plague spread to everything. Dogs died in mid bark, birds fell frozen from the sky, and bees and butterflies were artfully posed atop every imaginable variety of flower. There was no decay, because even the hungry microscopic life that feasts on rot became frozen little bits of abstract art. With time, perhaps the wind and rain will wear it all down into heaps of dust, but for now, the world is a world filled with statues.

Copyright 2002 by John Clinbrohf. Permission is granted to print single copies of this story to read or share with others. The story may not be altered in any way, and must include this copyright notice.

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