by Audrey Coldwell<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There is a woman in the garden.<\/p>\n
I almost don\u2019t go to her. She isn\u2019t asking me to\u2014there\u2019s no calling my name, no beckoning me with desperate hands. She\u2019s just standing there, naked in the moonlight. I have class in the morning, work after that. I have no time to give her.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t ask where she came from or why she is in my garden on a nondescript Wednesday night. Instead, I ask her name.<\/p>\n
She tells me. It\u2019s old fashioned and simple. It is a name made to be written hastily on a coffee cup, fifty-cent tip. I\u2019ve heard it before, and I\u2019ll hear it again.<\/p>\n
But then she starts telling me other names. Rosemary, she says. Marie, London, Theophania. They aren\u2019t 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\u2019ve never seen, twice, and still wishes she hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Finally, I ask her the real question:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019ve had all of these names, why are you here?\u201d<\/p>\n
She looks over her shoulder to the dozens of statues dotting our garden. There are names marked on each pedestal, I know\u2014I\u2019ve seen them all a thousand times, though it\u2019s been years since I\u2019ve stopped to read them. I thought I knew them. And there, lost somewhere within the rest, is an empty platform. I don\u2019t have to read it to know it is marked with that coffee-cup name.<\/p>\n
She walks me to that pedestal and tells me she is one of the lucky ones. At least she has one name left\u2014at least she is seen. Even she doesn’t know how many are lost beneath our feet, hidden in the soil under the corn fields.<\/p>\n
I help her back onto her stone stage. I have to go\u2014she can\u2019t turn back while I\u2019m looking. But she holds me there with a final question: \u201cHow many of your names will they remember?\u201d<\/p>\n
I go back inside without an answer, and I leave the porch light on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n