When they ordered me down off my pedestal, I had nowhere else to go.

Life as a statue is easy. They make you ascend the pedestal, turn you to stone, remove your ability to move, and leave you to watch the turn of the seasons in a world you cannot touch or care about, anymore. You can only stand in the public garden where all the convicted are placed, and you watch with dull and distant interest at the visitors who stroll past, living the lives of the quick, sometimes interested in all the immobile condemned, and sometimes not.

It is not fun, but it is not torture either, the way it would be if you were left the capacity to care. Fun is just a word that no longer applies, and the years are just time, crawling by like a snail on a pane of glass. It is easy because it requires no effort and takes nothing from you but your humanity.

Returning to the world, once you have served your sentence, is more difficult.

The custodians of the gardens don’t give you any money and they don’t offer you a job; they just say, “leave,” and if you’re smart, you start walking. You must, because otherwise they’ll petrify you again and put you on another pedestal, frozen in whatever position they have chosen for you. This time you will remain there forever, and many have, because their dulled wits did not provide the impetus for the first step toward whatever destination a released stone man can choose.

I would not have been upset by permanent immobility. I was made of stone and did not care about anything. But after some delay to urge my thoughts back into constructive motion, I remembered that I’d once had a home; the place where I’d been when they’d come for me, where I’d lived as a short-tempered idiot and a married man, where I’d broken a man’s back in a barroom fight, and earned my ten years on display as a statue.

I put one foot in front of the other, and then did it again, and after that did it again, a process that once begun, took care of itself. I did not even have to think of it. My legs, given the order to walk, obeyed, and left me alone with my thoughts, which were not many. What thoughts I had only accumulated like drifting sediment, and most of them were of a woman’s name.

Ariella.

I made my way out of the park and from there out of the city and from there into the countryside, trudging past villages that did not make much fuss about me as long as I did not tarry or interfere with the lives of those still made of flesh. I sometimes saw people at their fences, watching me as I passed, their hands folded against their chests in silent judgment. I left them behind only to face a new set of pitiless eyes, bearing the same warning, at the next curve of the road, or the one after that.

Soon those populated places thinned out. I entered the places where I was most of the time the only being visible. The land became less dominated by farms and more dominated by woods and empty fields. I marched through torrential rain and the road became a soft strip of mud, where my stone shoes sank to ankle-depth, turning every step into an exercise in first freeing a foot from imprisonment. It got cold. Now the people I encountered wore heavy coats, and exhaled little clouds of vapor. Some coughed from chests clogged from winter illnesses, and they looked miserable, a state of being I vaguely envied, even though I was stone all the way through and had no lungs to clog. What cold I felt, the part that would always be part of me now that I was no longer flesh, was the chill that goes with being stone. But I remembered being a man and registered the winter through the way it looked, if not the way it felt against a body that was no longer flesh; the grayness of it, the sense winter tends to have that the world will never be warm again. It looked like I was peering inward at the thing I had become.

The entire journey had only two significant social interactions,