Bloom in Reverse

Bronze

11 BRonze During her last days on earth, I was dating a prop master, a six-week romance that involved flamingos and pillowcases, feather boas and lace. He took me to the basement of the theater to show me his workshop: statues carved out of high-density foam, lamps reconstructed into bedposts, circular saws and sewing machines— he could do it all, fashion anything out of anything else, except the one thing he could make nothing of, the girl behind the pool cue, because by the time he decided to use his tools on me I was already a figure cast in bronze, unmalleable, dense but unsteady on my feet, face frozen in a blank expression, a numbness at what a friend of mine had done in another city, and then it was too late, I couldn’t be uncast, melted down, or freed. My friend had become a statue, the molten metal hardening around her head, her heart, each limb fixed into position 12 for the terrible thing she’d do inside that shell of hers, the deep and impenetrable fortress she was locked behind where no one could reach. After the news I could no longer move— inelegant, catatonic, detached— stuck in the one pose I let myself strike before everything set into place. In our metallic suits, we were safe from everything in the world, but inside the armor, where we really lived, also dwelled our very own unrelenting and brutal thing against which there was no second skin to protect us. ...