ORIGINAL COLOR HANDMADE LIBERTY STATUE
It wasn’t like anyone wanted it to happen, it was just one of those weird quirks of the universe. The random shift in the natural order. One morning, everybody woke up, and the Statue of Liberty was orange. Bright orange. Everyone asked around, to see who saw it last green, or if they saw it change, but no one did. One single moment that no one was looking, and then it was orange. That morning, there was mass panic in the city. They get freaked out over stuff like that. Some of the early reports wondered if it was a terrorist attack, but nobody gained anything from turning green to orange. An anarcho-syndicist art group claimed to have painted it overnight, “as a statement to show the liminality of the artificial world.” Everybody quickly realized they had no idea what they were talking about. Even still, they couldn’t have painted the statue: there was no paint on it. A bunch of fancy scientists in fancy lab coats did some fancy testing and found no paint. It was just… orange. The color of the fruit. It was green, then it was orange. Some people, who wanted to be smug about it, said they liked the change. “The statue is actually made of copper, and the green came from years of patina, so this is closer to the original hue.” No one liked the know-it-alls. They were such a drag.
The person who took the oranging hardest was a small painter in Michigan. He had a tiny online store set up where he sold Statue of Liberty models. Little three-inch statuettes that were intricately detailed, and were really quite impressive up close. He carved each one out of plaster by hand, and then painted them. No Liberty Bell or White House, or any other patriotic American icon, just the statue, with the same design, in the same position. He always said he liked it because of the international unity it inspired. The statue was from France, and it was the first thing immigrants saw when they came into the country. His father was one of those immigrants, fleeing his native Armenia as to escape horrible things. The statues were the painter’s pride. He spent years perfecting the art of these statuettes. He could produce a statue that you couldn’t honestly tell wasn’t a small version of the real thing. The painter once saw a photographer use one of his statues in a photograph, next to the real Lady Liberty. It was taken so that the statue looked as large as the real statue. He felt accomplished. But this new shade certainly could not do. He had worked at this for years! It was his whole life! Why should the painter change his work because one day something decided to be orange? Despite listings selling an “ORIGINAL COLOR HANDMADE LIBERTY STATUE,” no one really cared that it was green, after a few years. People stopped buying. No one wants to see what the Statue of Liberty used to look like. And that crushed the painter. What was he to do? He had a garage that was literally full of green paint in boxes. Some things you can just buy in extreme bulk, and “spontaneous oranging” is not really something one prepares their business for. But there he was, looking at boxes of boxes of green. And no one wanted green. He wanted green. Green was calm, soothing, classic. Green was unassuming. It just stood, and it didn’t have anything to say to anyone. Orange was loud, electric. He used it when he painted the torch. It looked good for fire.. But nobody wanted green anymore. Green was a historical relic, after a few years, people gave up trying to change the color of something when they weren’t actually sure what happened.
A letter from his sister. She took her family up to New York. They went to all the places you go in New York, the places that make New York the kind of place it is. Like a museum where the collection is still alive and moving. A few pictures. Times Square, Radio City Music Hall, laughing in a taxi cab. And finally, one of her family at the statue. His sister, her husband, three smiling young faces, ruddy with play. Her three boys grinned with maniacal glee. They had his family’s strong brow and wide shoulders. They would be grown soon. He imagined them joking, about their uncle’s quixotic struggle against the Statue, wanting to change an inanimate object. The statue was a new color, no matter what someone wanted it to be.
The painter looked into his fire box. It had barely been touched. The painter saw no reason not to give orange a try.
