by Audrey Coldwell
There is a woman in the garden.
I almost don’t go to her. She isn’t asking me to—there’s no calling my name, no beckoning me with desperate hands. She’s just standing there, naked in the moonlight. I have class in the morning, work after that. I have no time to give her.
And yet, I make my way through the bushes and stone statues. She takes a moment to see me, and says nothing once she does. She just smiles, something so small, but I can feel the years behind it, see the lines beginning to crease her pale skin, washed silver by the stars. I wonder if she has always looked like this.
I don’t ask where she came from or why she is in my garden on a nondescript Wednesday night. Instead, I ask her name.
She tells me. It’s old fashioned and simple. It is a name made to be written hastily on a coffee cup, fifty-cent tip. I’ve heard it before, and I’ll hear it again.
But then she starts telling me other names. Rosemary, she says. Marie, London, Theophania. They aren’t her names here, now, but she has been all of these women before. She tells me that she has been a girl knee-high in a creek, lost in the feeling of the freezing stream. She has been a woman on the sidewalk, cold hands curled around a steaming cup of tea, wondering if this will ever end. She has worn jackets and cloaks and hospital robes. She has sat in folding chairs and thrones. She rode her bike around every street I’ve never seen, twice, and still wishes she hadn’t skipped her senior trip to the Grand Canyon. There are a thousand versions of her beneath the layer of skin that I am stuck seeing, infinite names beyond the one that I know. I ask if she will tell me all of them; she asks if I have that much time.
Finally, I ask her the real question:
“If you’ve had all of these names, why are you here?”
She looks over her shoulder to the dozens of statues dotting our garden. There are names marked on each pedestal, I know—I’ve seen them all a thousand times, though it’s been years since I’ve stopped to read them. I thought I knew them. And there, lost somewhere within the rest, is an empty platform. I don’t have to read it to know it is marked with that coffee-cup name.
She walks me to that pedestal and tells me she is one of the lucky ones. At least she has one name left—at least she is seen. Even she doesn’t know how many are lost beneath our feet, hidden in the soil under the corn fields.
I help her back onto her stone stage. I have to go—she can’t turn back while I’m looking. But she holds me there with a final question: “How many of your names will they remember?”
I go back inside without an answer, and I leave the porch light on.
Audrey Coldwell is a sophomore at Louisiana State University, studying Creative Writing. Her first co-written short film is in production with the BFA film program, and she hopes to publish a novel after graduation.