This is something I wrote a couple of years ago and have never known quite what to do with. But since we’re entering Halloween season, and since it’s got just a hint of monster-ness to it, I’m sharing it here!
The Gargoyle
“I like that one best,” I always said, as a child,
pointing to you, my favorite gargoyle,
on our old church, where Father is rector.
There are only four of you, one per exterior corner, each different.
Our town is small and modest, you gargoyles the most extravagant things we have.
“Not that one?” Mother always said, about the one to the right.
“He looks more human. Has a nice face.”
No. I stuck with you.
Mother was skeptical – “Kind of wild” –
because you’re part dog, part lion, part dragon, part who knows,
mouth wide and laughing, sassy tongue out.
But you were my favorite. You still are.
Then came that rainy Saturday evening in May, when I was seventeen.
My parents were gone, at a charity meeting.
Left me instructions to pick lilies and put them in vases
for tomorrow’s services.
Rivulets ran down our windowpanes.
I looked across the garden, from our house to the church, and smiled.
I carried a vase of white lilies through the warm rain
to you, clinging to the church’s south corner,
a stream pouring from your laughing mouth.
I held up the vase
and let your little waterfall fill it.
You must have liked my gesture. Because you moved. Changed.
Gray warming to tan; hard stone shifting to supple skin,
dragon-thing to man-thing.
You looked at me and spat out the rain, and laughed,
and crawled down the wall.
I’ve known you all my life. You’ve known me all mine.
It was easy to trust you,
easy to fetch a choir robe from the sacristy for you to wear over your wet nakedness,
easy to laugh in breathless delight with you, clutching one another’s hands at last,
to sit in an empty pew together, vases of dripping lilies at our feet, and talk.
We kissed before you climbed back up the wall that evening
and turned yourself back into innocent stone.
(You smelled of the rain and the robe-cloth.)
I came back the next night, after my parents were asleep,
and kissed you longer, harder, lying with you on the thin red carpet of the nave.
(You tasted of garden herbs, earthy and potent.)
You were the first to touch me as a lover,
and you were warm flesh, though I teased that you must be careful not to scratch me with your stone.
(You felt like heaven on Earth.)
Three years of these blissful nights have tumbled past.
My parents have grown concerned.
Don’t I want to meet other young people? Date? Marry?
I smile up at you
and say I’m thinking I’d like a quiet, pious life,
just me and the church.
Perhaps I’m imagining it,
but it seems my mother gives a long, shrewd frown toward you and your companions,
a longer look at the one to the right of you, with the “nice face,”
before she turns away.
Thanks for reading!
If you liked this, you might wish to check out my novel Ballad for Jasmine Town, which also features a man who can turn into a gargoyle-like creature, although in different circumstances than these (no church involved).
Also: did you notice I never specified the gender of the narrator? Yeah, that was intentional. ;) Happy Bi Visibility Month!