It’s easier to settle Dorian on the floor than the benches. The elevator doors remain open, waiting.
Mirabel looks back the way they came, through the still-open door into the Collector’s Club.
“Do you trust me, Ezra?” she asks.
“Yes,” Zachary answers without taking the time to consider the question.
“Someday I’m going to remind you that you said that,” Mirabel says. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a small metal object and it takes Zachary a moment to realize it’s a handgun. The small fancy sort that a femme fatale might tuck into a garter belt in a different sort of story.
Mirabel lifts the gun and points it back through the open door and shoots the lantern where it sits on its stack of cardboard boxes.
Zachary watches as the lantern explodes in a shower of glass and oil and the flames catch and grow, feasting on cardboard and wallpaper and paintings and then his view is obscured by the elevator doors as they close and then they are descending.
Once there was a woman who sculpted stories.
She sculpted them from all manner of things. At first she worked with snow or smoke or clouds, because their tales were temporary, fleeting. Gone in moments, visible and readable only to those who happened to be present in the time between carving and disintegrating, but the sculptor preferred this. It left no time to fuss over details or imperfections. The stories did not remain to be questioned and criticized and second-guessed, by herself or by others. They were, and then they were not. Many were never read before they ceased to exist, but the story sculptor remembered them.
Passionate love stories that were manipulated into the vacancies between raindrops and vanished with the end of the storm.
Tragedies intricately poured from bottles of wine and sipped thoughtfully with melancholy and fine cheeses.
Fairy tales shaped from sand and seashells on shorelines slowly swept away by softly lapping waves.
The sculptor gained recognition and drew crowds for her stories, attended like theatrical performances as they were carved and then melted or crumbled or drifted away on the breeze. She worked with light and shadow and ice and fire and once sculpted a story out of single strands of hair, one plucked from each member of her audience and then woven together.
People begged her to sculpt with more permanence. Museums requested exhibitions that might last more than minutes or hours.
The sculptor conceded, gradually.
She sculpted stories out of wax and set them over warm coals so they would melt and drip and fade.
She organized willing participants into arrangements of tangled limbs and twined bodies that would last as long as their living pieces could manage, the story changing from each angle viewed and then changing more as the models fatigued, hands slipping over thighs in unsubtle plot twists.
She knit myths from wool small enough to keep in pockets though when read with too much frequency they would unravel and tangle.
She trained bees to build honeycombs on intricate frames forming entire cities with sweet inhabitants and bitter dramas.
She sculpted stories with carefully cultivated trees, stories that continued to grow and unfold long after they were abandoned to control their own narratives.
Still people begged for stories they could keep.
The sculptor experimented. She constructed metal lanterns with tiny hand cranks that could be turned to project tales on walls when a candle was placed within them. She studied with a clockmaker for a time and built serials that could be carried like pocket watches and wound, though eventually their springs would wear out.
She found she no longer minded that the stories would linger. That some enjoyed them and others did not but that is the nature of a story. Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another.
Only when she was much older did the sculptor consent to work with stone.
At first it proved difficult but eventually she learned to speak with the stone, to manipulate it and discern the tales it wished to tell and to sculpt it as easily as she once sculpted rain and grass and clouds.
She carved visions in marble, with moving piece
s and lifelike features. Puzzle boxes and unsolvable riddles, multiple possible endings left unfound and unseen. Pieces that would stand steadfastly and pieces in constant motion that would wear themselves to ruin.
She carved her dreams and her desires and her fears and her nightmares and let them mingle.
Museums clamored for her exhibits but she preferred to show her work in libraries or in bookstores, on mountains and on beaches.
She would rarely attend these showings and when she did she did so anonymously, lost amongst the crowd, but some would know her and quietly acknowledge her presence with a nod or a lifted glass. A few would speak with her about subjects other than the stories on display, or tell her their own stories or remark on the weather.