The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

One Night 
by Kathryn Ptacek 

The moonlight swept across the statue, glinting on the mica embedded in the stone, and slowly the grey softened, and he raised his head as his wings shook, once again free. With great care, he stretched and gazed around at the plaza whitewashed with the night glow.

He inhaled deeply of the sweet scent of flowers that bloomed only at night. He remembered that his mother had planted those long ago for him. Long long ago.

His mother and sisters had visited him faithfully each year until one by one they stopped. His mother was first, and his older sister told him with sorrow that their mother was sick and dying. She would be dead long before the next Night, and he had felt the tears well up inside. It was not the Night, so the tears had not fallen, but he knew his sister had known his grief.

The sisters continued to visit, even on the nights that were not special, and they brought their husbands and children and their children’s children, but he knew the younger ones didn’t understand, didn’t care.

He had just one visitor now, after all these years. She and he had played together as children, and there had always been that silent understanding between them that when they reached a certain age, they would marry. But before that happened, even though he was barely out of his teens, he had had words with a powerful mage, and all too soon he had come to rue his unwise action. When he awoke the next day, he was in the plaza, for all of eternity except for a single night in the year when the moonlight washed against his stone limbs.

She visited each year and brought more flowers and little things that she had made him, and they talked long into the night, he on the pedestal, she below, her face upturned to his, the love still evident in her eyes.

But tonight … tonight he did not see her, and he waited for hours. He watched as the sky lightened little by little, and still he waited. Looking across the great plaza, he thought he saw someone running down the ruins of the steps. And he felt a stirring in his heart.

But then the first ray of sunlight touched him, and he moaned aloud as his body began to stiffen, the stone creeping back into his limbs. As his wings arched outward, he looked straight ahead and saw her race toward the base of the pedestal. She was crying, and she dropped her armful of marigolds that she had brought, and she rested her head against the stone, but it was too late.

And, as he gazed down at her, the grey hair pulled back, the lines on her face, he knew this might be the last time he saw her, and he wept silently.

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Fiction © Copyright Kathryn Ptacek
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com