[Summer Contest Entry 2015] The Tragedy of Venus de Milo

“Good evening, Venus!”

I thought tonight would be the same as any other night.

“It’s time to get you all tidied up again!”

You would caress and wipe my body with your Nitrile gloves and microfiber cloth.

“The boss told me they no longer had a need for an elderly caretaker like me. What should I do Venus? Oh, don’t worry. I’ll still come visit you even when I get a new job!”

Then I would listen to your struggles and gaze at your back as you lock up the place and leave.

Though it may seem shallow to you, those nights were truly enjoyable for me. You conversed with me to no end despite the fact that the only reply I gave to you was eerie silence as I stood with the usual unchanging expression on my face.

I have lived for two millennia, but no human ever cared for me as much as you did.

Even as I was unearthed from my dwelling place in Milos, I was not treated with compassion. I was treated as what I was; a mere statue. An object meant to be appraised, sold, and observed.

For nearly two centuries since I was discovered, countless men have touched and wiped my figure, but not a single one ever treated me as a human. None of them spoke to me with sympathy as you did.

Everyday, I earnestly watched the clock tick. Waiting for the moment of brief solitude as the visitors left the vicinity; waiting for the moment when that desolation is shattered and replaced with an atmosphere of intimacy. Intimacy that made me experience what it was like being human.

But every story has an end. Even the ironically unrequited romance of a goddess of love’s physical replica comes to a halt.

Tonight, those joyous days faded into oblivion.

You were the answer to my indifference of life. The remedy to the loneliness that I thought would last eternally throughout my immortal existence.

But now, you are the subject of my tormentous dreams.

I could do nothing but watch. Watch as you were being slaughtered before me.

I could not even shut my eyes to prevent myself from witnessing the macabre event. I was forced to gaze as a sharp blade went in and out of your body a myriad of times. The ground and I were stained crimson red as your blood shot out with the edge’s ascension.

You lay on the ground; as unmoving as a statue like myself.

I tried to put strength into my legs in an effort to make them move, but to no avail. I attempted to do the same with at least my head, but it bore the same result.

Internally, I screamed. I cursed the gods for their act of sadism and myself as well for my own frailty.

Why did the gods not grant me the gift of mobility? Just like humans, I was physically fashioned in the image of the gods. I possess the ability to think and within me burn the same sentiments that drive their wills. Then why can I not move? What difference do I have from them? What cruelty have I done in my past lives that damned me into having to bear such agony?

What irony it is to be a sculpture of a Goddess of Love when I hold no power to save the man before me.

Will there ever come a time when I can bask in the glory of my unrequited love, or am I truly an accursed contraption hexed by the same gods I was designed after?

Why have I even been granted the capability to harbour emotion when it offers but a fleeting moment of happiness at the cost of eternal misery?

If only I were granted the power of a goddess, your butcher would have been smote a thousand-fold for him to experience not only the physical pain you suffered, but as well as the emotional anguish that I underwent.

But unfortunately, I am but a statue; a powerless figure with a mind to think and eyes to see, but without a body that follows my will.

The most I could do to avenge your death was to stare daggers at the man as he unmounted a painting off a wall and faded into the darkness of the night.

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Breaking News! This morning, the twenty first of August in the year 1911, the famous Leonardo Da Vinci painting, the Mona Lisa, was found missing from the Salon Carré section of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. Officials suspect Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet, to be the mastermind behind the devious heist. Furthermore, the bimillennial-aged statue by Alexandros of Antioch, the Venus de Milo was stained with the blood of a man, found in front of the statue with multiple stab wounds, identified to be a caretaker employed in the same museum.

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