A Curious Moon

By DB Bracey

The Arthur Ashe statue stood stoic, keeping guard over Monument Avenue. Years had caused him to dull into a faded bronze. A cloudy night sky webbed with lightning. The storm marched on, but thunderstorms couldn’t cool injustice.

The protesters poured down the side streets toward the avenue. Signs held high, call-and-response chants rose higher. Their minds on fire with a history of images—black daughters and sons choked and shot and beat and dragged behind trucks and hung and burned in front of courthouses.

A police barricade built to stem the tide, to defend the monuments of Richmond, Virginia—a dam of sawhorses and SUVs and men in riot gear and a tank loaded to blast tear gas. A helicopter circled above and washed a spotlight over the crowd.  

The voices shouted down the guard, helmeted and protected from their words behind plexiglass shields. Thunderclaps roared. The furious rain splashed in big, angry drops, causing steam to rise from the scorched earth.

A Zeus Strike zapped a lifeless Arthur Ash and the statue’s eyes cracked open. His clothes and glasses contorted with a scrunch, his skin alive like mercury. In life, just a soft-spoken tennis player—the first black man to win Wimbledon. In death, he was an immortal, catching bird shit.

His eyes swam and settled, sharpened at the display down the street. Little bronze children circled him. They reached up for the visage of books in his hand, for the tennis racket in his other hand. He felt his neck loosen. His lips shine to life.

“Move,” his voice gargled a metallic growl. His gut burned. Heat rose. Bronze smelted inside-out. His surface rippled like tiny gold waves in motion—cartoonish. His core solid. His feet firm when he stepped. The bronze books dripped down from his hands like electrified syrup to the children circled at his feet. The droplets hit the children’s heads and sparked. The children—two boys, two girls—woke. Their bronze faces undulated as the lightning scored in the break beyond the surrounding trees. The children released a rusty giggle, swelling into entwined laughter like a rasp jangling across a bicycle chain.

The little statues shook off their stiffness. The rain sizzled off them all.

Arthur took a cautious step to the edge of his granite pedestal. He leapt, a ton of mass landed in a plump and reshaped in a snap. The sound lost in the storm, but the quake stirred attention down the street.

Heads spun, the officers caught between the marching horde and the strange figures taking shape behind them in the brilliant streetlights—maybe a trick of the rain, the downpour creating a collective figment of the imagination.    

Then, the chopper’s spotlight flashed across Arthur and the children. They gave the light no matter as they turned and walked away from the commotion, down the center of Monument Avenue—one blade in a fan of streets spiraling out from Richmond’s City Center.

Hand signs were given, and a squad of riot cops split off the crowd control and trailed the statues that had come to life. 

Arthur paid no mind to the posse and waved his tennis racket, smacking at the rain, sparks flying as the racket gathered speed. Renovated mansions lined the street—the Colonial Revivals and Spanish Colonials, the design experiment of The Branch House, a Tudor Revival, and the style rebirths of the French and Italian Renaissances. The Mediterranean Villas out of place among the Plantation-styles. Quaint storefronts full of art galleries and fine dining. The churches of stone, bell towers and chapels reached up for the faint moon.

Behind Monument Avenue, Chinese takeout and Starbucks and Walmart and MacDonald’s and CVS. Behind that, the University of Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth, the state capital.

Arthur came upon another monument—the seated scientist, the Pathfinder of the Seas—Matthew Fontaine Maury—a confederate naval officer, a spoke in the machine. The statue looked down from his sea captain’s perch. Above him, a bronze globe sat. On the globe, the scene was a raging sea tempest. A curious collection of men and boys, a bull and a hound dog spinning in a storm-tossed wave. A beautiful woman in the center of it all, caught in the middle of the mess. Her wet dress clung to her thin frame.

The police gained ground, just behind them now. The Children danced toward them, frolicked in a circle around them. The confusion was evident even under their helmets and masks—gapped mouths, nostrils flaring, wild eyes.

Arthur clinched his fist and opened his hand wide, making form from his own molten being, a tennis ball rose from his palm—an orb, alight and animated in his hand. He tossed the orb high above his head, and when it reached its apex and began to fall, he swatted a serve into the memorial statue of Matthew Fontaine Maury. The granite dais shook. The globe above Maury’s head rattled loose of the sculpted water’s grasp and rotated. The globe rocked into a warbled rotation, built speed until it spun, and the waves spun around its core. The rotting hands of the ocean’s dead reached down from the spinning globe. Maury’s face came alive, recognized his station. The tempest rotated faster, created a confused mass of body parts and white caps and shattered vessels, created its own gravitation pull. The beautiful woman hovered in the center, seemingly untouched. A lips sharpened into a crescent. 

“Go to the depths where you belong.” Arthur pushed his glasses up from the tip of his nose, firm on the bridge, the glasses coalesced with the skin.  “Go now.” 

Maury gripped his throne with both hands. His body bubbled and gooped and dripped in sloppy bronze bits and dissolved like melting butter in the rain—his bust, his trunk, his limbs—gobbled up with his ocean charts for new slavery routes and compasses pointing south. The stars he studied long dead, his memorial sucked into a supernova of bronze goo.

One of the officers shouted into his radio, “We need reinforcements!”

The Children, twice the size of the cops, swooped them up in their arms and clutched them against their smooth, warm bodies. They danced a waltz with the cops calling out obesity and cries for help.

Arthur trudged down the street, came face to face with an imposing statue astride his statue horse. The statue faced north, doubled Arthur in size. He smiled up at the stoic man. “Hello, Stonewall.” He said.

Stonewall Jackson, a decorated Confederate general, now a mass of metal to remember him. From Arthur’s palm, a flame burst and produced another orb.

“Be gone.” Arthur fired a forehand shot into Stonewall Jackson’s left arm, exactly where he was hit by friendly-fire during the Civil War. The orb burned through the man like a fever. His wiry beard contorted on his face, coming to life and falling into himself in the same moment. His wounds a drain, sucking him into obscurity.

The helicopter appeared above. The light ballyhooing around Arthur. He walked on before Stonewall had wholly dissipated. The sound of the police tank rumbled behind him, the tank’s track grinding on the asphalt.

Arthur didn’t shield his eyes from the light. He didn’t turn to see the tank. Instead, he bounced another fiery orb on the whirling strings of his racket. Up ahead, a classical tragedy awaited in the median. A fallen president held court. His backdrop was a semi-circle of thirteen Doric columns. Confederate President Jefferson Davis sculpted as if he were ablaze in oration from the base of the Orpheum to an empty crossroad. A burger wrapper blew down the street between them. Davis’ arm stretched out, looking for the sacrifice of a modern-day Richmond.

Crowning the shaft of a six-story column behind him balanced a Vindicatrix—a toga-clad woman imprisoned, pointing to the heavens.  Deo Vindice was inscribed at her feet—God Being the Vindicator. The color of their skin the same—Arthur and Davis and the female martyr—all bronze and aged.  

Arthur dribbled the orb on the strings of his racket. He bounced a high rebound and swung the racket with a roundhouse motion, sending the orb high enough to slam into the pedestal just below the toga-clad woman’s feet. The ball exploded, raining sparks down on Davis’ head.

As if flinching, the chopper swerved in the sky, slicing the through the rain. The thunder boomed as the confederate display came crashing into itself. Arthur said, “A lost cause, indeed.”

Arthur slung his hand up, almost mimicking the Vindicatrix. An orb flew from his fingers into the air and down to his racket in a striking forehand. The orb blasted the heavens like a reversed lightning strike and a funnel cloud spiked down to earth, ravished the soapbox drama in a sparking tornado of wind and light, snatching up the whole scene in a vacuum tube of erasure.

The tank sped past Arthur and spun. A hatched banged open and a cop rose with a tear gas launcher in hand. Without a beat, the cop pulled the trigger and a canister of gas punched Arthur in the chest and dropped to Arthur’s feet, rolling around like it was alive, spewing smoke.

Arthur felt nothing when the rubber bullets struck him, took no notice when he absorbed the bullets from their pistols. He only leveled his eyes through the fog, out to the middle of the grassy loop beyond the tank. There, not much more than a silhouette across the lawn, General Robert E. Lee towered atop a forty-foot pedestal. He sat in the saddle of his horse, Traveler. He appeared to be waiting for the rain to cease to jump from the pedestal and rally the troops.   

Arthur swiped the tear gas fog back toward the tank with his racket. He stared at the statue. “Any last words, Rob.”

Arthur waited for the statue to reply, maybe offer a regret, apologize for open sores or the scars he left behind. But the bronze giant sat silent.

Another cannister bounced off Arthur’s head. Another struck his leg. He paid no mind, simply said, “To oblivion then.”

Arthur ripped a backhand into one of the gray marble columns that flanked the general. The marble sentinel cracked, and the ball reflexed back to Arthur’s waiting racket. He walloped a volley back at Lee’s column. It struck and threw sparks. Over and over, Arthur hit the ball. The ball hit the columns, and the columns fell in pieces, until the general collapsed to the ground in a twisted mass. He let the orb strike Lee and return to him, again and again. Little by little, the figure disappeared, devouring himself in bitter bites. His face a sad death mask, bubbling into a liquid and mixing with the rain.

The cops had disembarked the tank, they walloped Arthur’s legs and waist—the highest they could reach. Arthur didn’t attack the mortals, didn’t breath, didn’t smile with gratification. His temperament held eternally even. He shook the pests away with a kick here or a hip bump there. He strode on, the tank tracking him, the pesky peace officers struggling to keep up. Every few seconds, new cannisters of tear gas pinged off the champ.

By the time he reached Lombardy Avenue and the J.E.B. Stuart monument, it wasn’t a matter of being ready. It was simply a matter of the next task. But there was no need. The masked protesters fought through the tear gas. A line of real men on horses, police batons swung as the mob cast straps over and around J.E.B. The statue faced north, the image of a cavalry all-star, turned in his saddle, looking back over his shoulder, appeared to be racing away from the crowd on horseback. They yanked J.E.B. back, his horse’s foot raised in mid-gallop. The tail caught in the air, mid-whip.

Arthur’s eyes unblinking, glistened gold in the dark sockets. “Your race is over.”

The protesters trampled the gate around Stuart’s memorial. A tug of war tore the stoic bronze figure from its granite base. It crashed to the ground in a dead thump. The crowd roared and the cops unleashed a volley of rubber bullets. Arthur slapped forehands at the police riot shields, at the police on horseback. His orbs blasted screaming waves of pent-up energy, pushing their lines back, knocking them off their feet, blowing the cops from their saddles.

“Go on,” Arthur’s voice boomed over the crowd, over the cops. “This is bigger than you. The pressure of time stacked on top of time. Time to release. Let revolutions’ hand have its way.” 

The cops charged again, bashed at Arthur with batons. An orb dripped from his fingertips like lava. He swung his arm back to strike the orb but two officers leaped up to grab ahold of his wrists. He swung through his forehand, the officers went flying. The orb dribbled down the street, knocked the riot cops aside, sent them scurrying into side streets.

The crowd erupted in chants, “Enough is enough.”

Arthur crashed another orb like a serve high in the air. The gooey ball splashed into the police helicopter, caused it to wobble sideways. The pilot brought it down in park, the blades chopping at the air as it got closer to the ground.   

Arthur stood in the drizzling rain, thick puddles like caramel trickled around his feet.

“Enough is enough.”

The center of the street’s roundabouts sat empty now. This sacrifice was only the beginning. The thunder was gone. The lightning a memory. Clouds ephemeral. The winds barely stirred a breeze to shake the sugar maples and oaks that hung over the curbs. The early orange of the morning creeped around the traffic circle. He felt a weakness deep. He knew the day would end this run, but he wasn’t finished.

The cops had either run out of tear gas or conceded to give him a police escort as he staggered to Capitol Square, toward the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial. The chants of the protest behind him now. falling off as the morning cooled the passion like the flowers wilting in dew.

In the plaza, the bronze statues looked new, not faded yet. The heat rose, but they refused to sweat. Their faces burned fresh and angry and hopeful—statues of lawyers and a fighting reverend and young students and common folk from the commonwealth—all of them forever stuck protesting a segregated, ramshackle school in the fifties. They were only a touch bigger than the flesh-covered gawkers that strolled past them every day.   

One of the congregated statues, a young woman stood in front. Her eyes focused on the horizon. Her hand held up in a motion of yearning. Her palm opened to the rolling morning light. The light sorted in beautiful shadows along the contours of her face, the hard ruffles of her dress. Her name was Barbara Johns. Her words emblazoned on a granite wall behind her and the other protesters. It seemed like reaching for the moon.  

The clouds shifted, and Arthur noticed the stubborn moon still up there, still granting him time. Arthur bent and placed his bronze palm against Barbara Johns’. A shockwave pulsed through him, into her. The electricity leapt the gap back to the protesters behind her. Shoulder to shoulder, the current traveled. Their consciousness ignited. Their eyes became loving pools of focus and fury. Their faces animated. Their bodies lumbering to life.  

“You’ve got work to do.” Arthur said to Barbara.

Her eyes alight with the morning. Her face alive, reaching for words.

With a slight flick of his wrist, Arthur produced another orb. He grunted with the swing of the racket that sent a glittering bronze ball two-hopping over houses in grand arcs. The orb caught the wind, curved over Hollywood Cemetery and smashed a burning hole through the Confederate Pyramid. The pyramid compromised, it toppled and knocked over the oldest headstones. The rest of the hand-stacked stones crumpled in a heap.

Arthur’s children returned to him, melting first in puddles of bronze beside him. He felt his racket fade into a whip, then a handful of liquid, dripping to the ground, as he fell to his hands and knees, as if he worshipped at an altar before Eucharist. “Take this body back,” Arthur’s voice fading as if he stood in an empty cathedral. “Let me transfer the spirit upon these soldiers like the dewfall, so that they may become the body in movement.”

 His body rippled one last time and leaked onto the pavement in glops, until his form was no more than a puddle, evaporating in waves and given back to history until he would be needed again.

A parade of beautiful, shining faces had taken to the streets. Voiceless, most still worked the heavy metal from their throats. They hoisted their hands like picket signs. The sunlight revealed the speckled elements from which they were made, differing components molded together to call out the distinct beauty of the individual elements while displaying their strength through their sheer solidarity.

Remnants of the protesters still rambled around the city—those who weren’t arrested or beaten or escaped. These lucky few caught a glimpse as the newborn statues take long strides, widening into a march through the city and across the James River Bridge—their footfalls rumbled, leaving a path of mythic footsteps, heading south, splitting off to the west and north and east as worn and tired mortals filed in behind them. A mass comprised of distinct and mottled figures echoed into the past, shouted at the present and heralded the future.

DG Bracey is a teacher and a freelance writer from the Carolina coast. He’s picked up degrees from the University of South Carolina, Coastal Carolina University, and the University of North Carolina – Wilmington. He’s published short stories in various journals and been a feature writer for several newspapers.