Thrust: A Novel

The day her body became a freestanding statue, a joy got into all of us. But so did a sadness. Looking up at this body we’d built with our hands and arms and legs and sweat and hearts — it opened up our throats a bit, stretched and stiffened our spines. Seeing her gaze out across the water made our chests open up, as if that were something hearts could do, as if you could just open your arms to the universe and sky and tilt your head up and open your mouth, and suddenly your heart would be something more than a muscled-up fist pumping in your chest. As if the beating of all our hearts might be something different than the life of one person.

The day before she was presented to the world, with pomp and presidential speeches and tickets sold to well-dressed onlookers and wealthy businesspeople, the body of us climbed off the last scaffoldings back to the ground. We spent the night before her birth celebrating beneath her shadow, with beer and wine and chocolate and music and rabbit stew and potatoes and sausages cooked over open fires, and puddings, breads, and cakes; we the body filled time and space with dancing of a hundred different kinds, so much dancing, to fiddles and guitars, pipes and harmonicas and concertinas and drums of all sorts, a singing made from everywhere we came from in waves of voices. Howling deep into the night. The sparks from the fire rose up toward the sky; our voices made bridges between people and land and water and animals and trees. Some of us slept right there on the ground, drunk on one another’s bodies, drunk on the end of things.

But it turned out that it wasn’t the end of things.

Is there ever an end to things?

For us, the statue stood unfinished, in a way. Or maybe what I mean is, she stood always on the verge of becoming.