This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Becauseisaidsotoo on 2024-12-27 01:52:10+00:00.

The park was a place my wife would have loved—she had a gift for finding art in the mundane. I started walking there in the evenings, months after she passed, not because I wanted to, but because sitting alone in our house—no, my house now—was unbearable. Silence pressed down like a physical weight, and her absence filled every room. The park, with its sprawling prairies, wooded trails, and scattered sculptures, offered no real solace, but I walked its paths anyway. It felt like something she might have done, marveling at the interplay of art and nature, pointing out details I would have missed.

All I missed was her.

Honestly, at first, I wasn’t marveling at anything. I walked the gently curving path around the park because it was all I could do—put one foot in front of the other, breathe in and out, and hope that someday, the emptiness might lift.

It didn’t.

There was one sculpture, though, that caught my attention and seemed to cut through my mental fog. It was a statue of a bronzed nude woman with disproportionately large hands and feet. She was perched high on a pedestal surrounded by wildflowers. Her back faced the path, her head tilted slightly upward, as if gazing longingly at the horizon. She stood apart from the other sculptures in the park, all alone at the edge of a small field of prairie grass. As lonely and isolated as me.

Her pose struck me—elegant but hesitant, like she wanted to retreat from the world but couldn’t. She was weathered, too. Streaks of green oxidation marred her smooth surface, bird droppings dotted her head and shoulders, and cracks ran along the edges of her pedestal.

I paused in front of her most evenings, not just because she was striking but because she was something familiar in a world suddenly without guardrails. Like me, she seemed worn down by time, exposed to the elements, and yet still standing. Waiting for something. God knows what.

This is silly, and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but sometimes—no, often—in passing, I whispered, “Hello,” under my breath. It felt ridiculous. I was ridiculous. But in the quiet of the park, it wasn’t hard to imagine she might hear me.

Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

The first time I noticed her head seemed to have moved, I laughed at myself. It wasn’t possible. I wasn’t that far gone. She was made of bronze, anchored to her pedestal. But over the following weeks, her pose shifted again. Each time I passed, her head seemed to turn slightly toward the path, her posture subtly different.

I told myself it was nothing—a trick of the light or my imagination. But as I whispered my hellos, the subtle impression of change unsettled me.

One evening, I stopped in front of her again, staring at her upturned face. “Hello,” I whispered softly, as was my custom.

“Get out of the way, old man!” a voice suddenly shouted behind me.

Startled and embarrassed, I turned just in time to see a young man on a bike speeding toward me. The wind of his passing tugged at my coat, and I stumbled backward, almost falling, barely avoiding him as he veered past. His mocking laughter trailed behind him as he disappeared down the path.

My heart jumped in my chest, and my face burned. It had been a close call. A jogger nearby glanced at me, and I noticed a family farther up the trail whispering to each other. I felt ridiculous. I could imagine how I looked to them: a senile old man, perverted, in the way, and ogling a nude statue.

But for a moment, I couldn’t move. My face still flushed and heart beating rapidly, my gaze drifted back to the statue. From where I stood, I could see her profile and the edge of one blank, expressionless eye. Her presence pressed down on me, heavy and unrelenting, as if she had witnessed my humiliation.

The next day, I avoided the main path entirely and wandered into the woods. I followed a dirt trail I hadn’t explored before. The quiet and the dappled shadows of the trees seemed welcoming, wrapping around me like a cocoon.

That’s when I saw them—footprints.

My breath caught, and my knees popped as I slowly crouched down to examine one of them. It was enormous, far too large and deep to be human. I examined them, squinting in the dusk. I could smell the freshly overturned earth, and one slightly trembling hand reached out and touched the bent and seemingly trampled grass. The tracks—they couldn’t be tracks—led off the dirt trail, disappearing into the dense woods. Against my better judgment, I followed.

The footprints, if that’s what they were, ended in a small clearing. In its center lay a smashed bike, its frame mangled and twisted. Blood smeared the handlebars and pooled on the dirt beneath it.

My stomach churned. I recognized the bike—it belonged to the young man who had nearly hit me.

I staggered back, my mind racing. He must have crashed, I told myself. The footprints? An animal. The blood? Not as much as it looked.

But even as I tried to convince myself, the air in the clearing felt wrong. The silence was now oppressive. The shadows were sinister. I turned and fled.

When I reached the main trail, the statue loomed ahead.

Her head seemed to have turned fully toward the path now. Her shoulders leaned forward, her posture expectant or predatory.

I froze. Her blank eyes seemed to bore into me, unseeing yet impossibly aware. Unable to meet her eyes, my gaze darted downward. That’s when I saw the stains.

Dark, reddish-brown streaks covered her hands and feet, glistening in the fading light.

Rust, I thought. Or paint.

Metal creaked above me, and one of her hands seemed to move, the fingers slightly, ever so slightly, contracting, as if slowly forming a fist or gesturing for me to come closer.

I forced myself to move, walking as quickly as I could manage, back toward the parking lot without looking back.

That night, I lay awake in a too-large bed, staring at the ceiling. My mind kept returning to the smashed bike, the footprints, and her blank, unyielding stare.

I woke the next morning to find two deep indentations in the mulch beneath my bedroom window. They were the same size and shape as the footprints in the woods.

I grabbed a rake and smoothed over the marks, muttering excuses to myself.

That night, I dreamed of her.

She stood next to my bed, her bronzed form gleaming in the moonlight. I couldn’t move, couldn’t even turn my head, but I felt her presence pressing down on me. Her blank eyes burned into me—cold, unfathomable, but wanting something. In my dream I think I whispered a choked out, “hello” before spiraling into a deeper darkness.

I woke gasping, freezing cold, with my heart pounding against my ribs. I sat and looked around wildly. In the dim morning light, I could see something at the foot of my bed. My shaking hand reached out and clawed at my glasses on my bedside table, knocking them to the floor in my haste. I reached down, put them on, and blinked rapidly to clear my eyes. I saw large, muddy footprints next to my bed and clumps of dirt scattered across the floor.

I felt the thing at the foot of the bed move and shift, and I sat up straight, my heart in my mouth and my throat tight. With one shaking hand, I reached out and yanked the chain of my bedside lamp. It snapped on, dispelling the morning shadows and revealing what was shifting and moving at my feet.

It was an upside-down bicycle helmet, rocking gently from the movement of my legs beneath the blankets. Cracked on one side and streaked with blood, the helmet overflowed with multi-colored wildflowers in brilliant disarray—scarlet, gold, violet—some with black dirt still clinging stubbornly to their tangled roots. The flower’s tender petals, still trembling slightly, were speckled with blood and damp and shining with the early morning’s dew.