The garden gnome

Unlike the plastic flamingo, which announces itself in a single shade of injection-molded pink, the garden gnome arrives pre-aged, its beard already grey, its cheeks already ruddy, as though manufactured with sixty years of a life already lived. Unlike the birdbath, it serves no function that can be pointed to. It does not water anyone. It stands, in a red cap and a blue coat, holding a shovel it will never lift, at the edge of a flowerbed it did not plant and will not weed. One specimen, repositioned four times across three houses, has not once altered its expression, which is the particular half-smile of someone keeping a secret he was told decades ago and has since forgotten the contents of. Chips open along one shoulder, then along the brim of the cap, then a hairline crack behind the left ear, and each time the household debates replacement and each time decides against it, for reasons nobody states aloud. A gnome that has weathered four moves and one dropped moving box earns something closer to tenure than ornament status. It watches the tomatoes fail every August with the same expression it wore watching them thrive the August before. It would be easy to call this indifference, and harder to say what else to call it. The tomatoes fail or thrive; the gnome keeps its cap and its counsel, and the household, for reasons it has never bothered to examine, keeps the gnome.

Marion Vale