Human Souls

[Boys Hanging From Branches Over Pond, 1992 - Bruce Davidson]

He imagined a child exiting the garden each morning, stepping out of the gate and opening wide eyes onto an object. A little brown-haired boy becoming a gray stone one day, a freckle-faced redhead turned into a cracked half of a robin’s egg nestled in the grass, the next. A little blond girl becoming an impossibly tall Lombardy tree. He imagined this going on day, after day, until the garden gate had to be moved because there were so many objects outside the garden; the garden growing larger and larger with hundreds of pebbles and ten identical Lombardies and countless willows and blue eggshells. Did those objects now have human souls? Were the children still in there, or were they merely transmuted, becoming trees and rocks and shells, their child-selves simply vanishing as though they had never existed?
-from Every Object