~5.7~

She couldn’t have said what had motivated her to close her eyes, but it felt right to her… she didn’t want to walk into somebody’s private patio, she wanted to step into a whole separate world. Laurie had spent her whole life… the important years, anyway, since she’d grown up and become more self-aware… looking for something meaningful, something special, something she couldn’t hope to find back home in Iowa.

She shifted forward a bit, wanting to make certain that she was completely past the threshold before she took a look around. She turned her head, too… she wanted to take it all in at once, in a single, slow sweep, starting from a corner that hadn’t been visible from the passageway. She wasn’t consciously planning all this, but that was how she’d seen it in her head.

She opened her eyes… for a moment, she thought somebody must have turned on a light, the moon seemed so bright. But then, she had closed her eyes in a dark space and then stepped out into it. In any case, her vision seemed perfectly adjusted to take in the scene with a sort of surreal hyper clarity. The individual bricks in the building, the cracks in the wooden parts, the spreading moss, the bird bath, the tiny stone bench with the statue of a pig-tailed girl on it, the hardy shrubs, the bare branches of the trees… she took it all in.

There were leaves on the ground, left where they had fallen… undisturbed by either wind or rake, unbroken. Her guide had been right: this place was untouched. Pristine, almost primeval. Though the whole tableau was man-made, she had a feeling like a cave explorer delving into a chamber where no human had ever walked, discovering an ecosystem that had not been disturbed in millennia.

It was silly, of course… all in her head. No. She brushed that thought aside. She wanted this, wanted to see something.

Slowly, the statue turned its head.