Down a rain soaked, potholed road, past the peeling picket that had long ago retired its job of holding boundary to an old woman's dog, there is a garden with a watcher. What once was a blooming sanctum of sorts, pridefully potted and churned, now grew to weed.
The Watcher had been placed at his post during those early days, back when people still cared weather the plants in the plastic greenhouse lived or died. It knew not who put him there; some caring hands with two blocks of wood, propped between the metal shudders of the plant house to let the sunlight in, that had, since then, fallen lazy and never found time to remove them. And so they remained, nothing more than what they were; a pair of molding wood pieces between rusted tin.
Until, by chance a girl took notice. "Those two blocks," she had said, "Don't you think they look a bit like eyes? You know, and the shudders like eyebrows and a mouth?"
An other child working in the garden shook his head, "Abstractly,"
"No really," the girl continued, "It's like it's watching the garden."
Thus the Watcher had come to exist. Even after the children left. Even after the tiles grew mossy and the birdbath full of scum. Even after the leaves of fall had come and gone...and come and gone...
And now it's metal brows drooped in the damp morning, unseeing eyes taking note, as it did each day, of the creeping vines' progress. And it observed the snails in their aimless races, trying and trying to find some sort of meaning in their pointless paintings.
Though it had no reason for watching the garden any longer, it watched it well. Forgotten to the devotion that had created it. Forgotten to it's family.
