MTU: Hard To Look At - Epilogue (Patreon)

I didn’t mention it before. I had decided to write this memoir before I turned 40 in a few months. Being able to look back at this time in my life with the perspective of being my age now is a gift. Let me catch you up on where I am and where my friends from this time period are today.

I still run the gallery. More on that later.

Ross and I had a falling out my sophomore year of college. We didn’t speak to one another for eight years after that happened. I could probably write another book about all that. We will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary around the time this memoir should be released. The years we were apart were very important for me. I had other relationships that showed me I had been a fool for allowing us to break up. On occasion, Elliot continues to chastise me not making up with Ross sooner.

Mom and Daddy are still living in town. They’re both retired. Mom likes to help out at the gallery. She’s still a whirlwind with no signs of slowing down. Daddy has settled into the role of grandfather rather well.

My son’s name is Everet. It sounds like Elliot without actually being Elliot. He’s four years old. He looks like a clone of his father at that age from the photos I’ve seen. All through my pregnancy I was worried what would have if I were holding my baby and he grabbed at my hairsnakes. I needn’t have worried. My hairsnakes are more smitten with Everet than even I am, I think.

I haven’t told Ross, yet. But by the time this book is released, we’ll have a second child. I hope it’s a girl. Who am I kidding? Ross will probably figure out I’m pregnant before I tell him. (He did.)

Thomas Radner is a respected member of the community. He’s a lawyer known for his pro bono work. He runs a youth group out of his church. And any time I have a showing of up and coming artists, he’s there to purchase at least a couple of the pieces. I have no idea where he stores them all. We aren’t friends. But we can talk to one another. I don’t know where he met his wife but she seems like a nice person. When he introduced us, she gave me a hug and thanked me for the impact I’d had on Thomas. I didn’t ask for a further explanation.

I don’t know where Jenny Wu lives. But I’ve heard she is doing well.

I keep in touch with Stacy, Melody, and Tess. We have a chat group that we started in high school. They asked me not to get into their private lives so I won’t.

It turns out Elliot and I are separable physically. We live on opposite coasts now. We make it a point to talk on the phone for a couple hours each week. That happened shortly after we graduated from college and I still miss not seeing him every day. He’s married to Kelsey, a woman he met in college. They have the most lovely daughter, Oriole.

The Hausers, Douglas and Betty, use to visit the gallery infrequently. Douglas died a few years ago. In his will, he donated the statue of Duke to the gallery. I placed him by the front door. Everet pets him every time he sees the statue. Betty moved away from town shortly after Douglas died. I think Mom still talks to her occasionally.

I’m still an artist. I still own the gallery. Even though it’s named after her, there are fewer people who even know the statue of Gillian is Gillian.

Hers isn’t the only statue there. There are a handful of people I’ve met over the years who love to be petrified. One of them was so pleading that he pays me to be a statue for a month at a time at least twice a year. Other people found out and I have a handful of people who spend time in a special room in the gallery that I had decorated to look like a garden: a statue garden. When Ross first saw the garden, around the time we made up with one another, he couldn’t stop laughing.

The number of petrifications and the frequency with which I prolong them has meant I no longer need to find a source for my unusual feeding. It’s been a long time since I slithered into the forest to create a menagerie of small animal statues.

Gillian O’Malley’s statue stands in the gallery to this day. I moved her into the statue garden where she is the centerpiece. The other statues have positions around the perimeter of the room.

I’ve even had a wedding there, once. The bride and groom spend a week as a statue between the being told they can kiss and being pronounced husband and wife. Every year on their anniversary, they have me zap them for the whole day. It’s on my calendar. I look forward to it each year.

I get to see Marie Applebottom most days. She is a semi-permanent fixture at the garden. She went to college with Elliot for a year before they broke up. After I graduated, she showed up at the gallery. I hadn’t seen her in four years. She asked if she could spend a few months as a statue. At the time I didn’t think the request from her was unusual. When her time was up she left and came back a few months later and asked again.

It took three years for her to tell me she had dropped out of college, that she still loved Elliot, and that she didn’t want to do anything but be a statue forever. She spends all but a week of the year as a statue. She owns a couple properties around town that she rents out. I suspect she’s very wealthy. When she found out people pay to be statues in the gallery, she gave me a million dollars for cover the next twenty years as a statue. The gallery will never go bankrupt because of that.

The one week of the year she spends as a person she meets with her lawyers and business partners to ensure things are running smoothly. And then it’s back into my garden for another year.

She also stands in the center of the statue garden with Gillian. She always poses in a manner that it looks like she and Gillian are supposed to be paired together. Everet calls her Statue Marie whether or not she’s a statue.

Even I spend time as a statue in the gallery. During a heated sexual encounter I accidentally zapped Ross. I felt bad about it and joined him by pushing some life force back into him. I overdid it and he ended up no longer being a statue and I was stuck for a couple hours. He joked I could spend time in the garden. It was near Halloween. I spend a few days before Halloween in the garden snaked around the room. People loved it. It’s a tradition now for me to spend a few days – last year it was almost a week – in my snake form as a statue in the garden. People take pictures and we charge admission. A few other “monstrous” twisted have joined me for the Halloween exhibit. We donate most of the proceeds from that to charities decided on by my fellow “monsters”. Everet loves Statue Mommy.

He also loves Snake Mommy. I’ve spent a lot of time the last couple years in my snake form. He likes it when I coil around him and then he climbs out of the pit he’s in. It’s fun now but I hope he outgrows it soon. He’s starting to get too heavy to be stepping on my tail.

And that’s about it. I’m sure there will be folks who tell me later I should have included something about this or that. But, that’s what going on late night television is for, assuming the book were popular enough. None of that matters. I love Ross and Everet and many other people. I love and I’m loved. When I was sixteen, I never thought I’d be able to say that twenty years later.