Searching for Something

By Peter Bowden

She stood high above the square, hand lifted to brow, as if forever searching for something just beyond the horizon. The sculptor had caught her in a moment of stillness, though all who looked upon her imagined wind in her stone-swept dress and the ache of distance in her eyes. They call her by many names, though no plaque named her, and no history claimed her. She simply was—perched in silence against the churn of sky.

Old men on benches said she looked for a lost love, a soldier who never returned. Children whispered she could see the future. Pigeons didn’t dare perch on her shoulder, and rain rolled off her like memory. On foggy mornings, the mist clung to her like a shawl, and in the last light of day, she seemed to lean forward ever so slightly, as if the thing she waited for had finally come into view.

And perhaps it had. Or perhaps the waiting was the whole of her story—etched not in marble, but in longing. A sentinel not for what had passed, but for what might still arrive. The statue stood, and the town went on living beneath her gaze. Time, like the wind, moved around her but never through her.

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