💣

Although an area more than a mile on a side had become known as Damkina’s garden, in the core of it was still the museum and its own gardens, the place where it had all, for a certain definition of the word, begun.

And in that garden, around the oldest statues, ones she had carefully brought and restored and up-kept, someone had knitted kilts.

Damkina walked around the two statues, observing them.  The one on the left had been sculpted in memory of her first husband — not by her, whose arts did not lay in the dead stone, but by someone she knew, by hands who had also loved that man.  The one on the right was a bit newer, a couple centuries, but was of a woman she had loved.  They were both, as was the style, naked.

Except currently they were both wearing kilts.

She studied the kilts — they had been knitted in place, or perhaps had been knitted off-site and finished in place.  They were well-done, in brilliant colors.

They were interesting.  But they were also — she wasn’t sure of the words.

She left them where they were, although she added a sketch, tucked in a sheet protector, of what these two had actually worn in their own times.  Kilts were not that far off, but they were, perhaps, a little understated.

The next time she returned to the core of her garden, someone had added a lovely crocheted pectoral to her first husband’s outfit.  Damkina found herself smiling.

The world was falling to compost and dust.  There would be revolution and there would be screaming and blood in the streets.  But if people could take the time to dress statues in garishly bright plastic yarns, then perhaps the sprouts that grew from this forest fire would be strong enough to carry it for another millennium or more.

She found some yarn and a crochet hook in an abandoned store, a book on crochet from the locked-down library, and a sad light pole at the edge of her greater garden, and she began to crochet.