Every time he looks at her, he talks about those lines. The perfect arm. The perfect hands. The perfect bones beneath her perfect skin. What have I done? Masterpiece. Look at those eyes. Mine, mine.
She smiles. She always smiles.
He finds her patient, if a little dull. That’s all right. He doesn’t mind. He prefers it, actually – he feels that she really listens to him, much like she did when she was stone.
She lets him talk. He can go on all day, and she lets him, lets the words slide off her. Drip, drip, drip. Which isn’t to say she never speaks, because she is alive now. She can speak, and she must.
Did you make any progress today? Did you sell another piece? Dinner is ready. The cat got out again, love.
He tells her everything. And why not? She, being made by him, is more than half himself, or at least that’s what he believes. In their – well, conversations – he details his every thought, his own genius, his complaints. He tells her the indignities he suffers from buyers who don’t appreciate him, the slights given him in the street. He recarves his sculptures, line by line and word by word, as she sits there smiling at him and his food grows cold.
Of the two, which is more foolish? He isn’t in love with her; she’s known for a long time now. He loved the stone, loved that he had made this with his own hands – loved the statue, not the woman. Now they live in the afterglow of his love, the other side of wonder, to be poetic – the place where stone is made imperfect flesh.
She wears the flesh without complaining. Still, she says very little, and nothing of importance. She is too used to silence to break the habit of it now.
The days grow longer; the nights shorter, hotter. His temper frays and snaps. No one buys, and those who do have no souls, no understanding of his art (not that they ever did to begin with), and they all have pinched faces. And money! As for money, none of them have it either, they haggle and barter – gods, barter! over the pieces, hemming and hawing, offering to pay half now and half later, as though he is some common craftsman. Was any artist ever so humiliated?
He seldom picks up his tools now; they’re living off the proceeds of friezes and sculptures carved months ago. He sits in the house, staring out the window. When he’s bored he holds her hand and talks for hours, and when he’s tired of talking he goes to the wineshop in the village. He comes home drunk, and when she smiles at him then he knocks her down. He curses her for her silence, but this wrings out of her no more than a few words.
Must I talk instead? Can’t you carry on a conversation, after all I’ve done for you? All I made you, I made you, you know.
He hates the silence, so he fills it himself. Drunk, he grumbles, boasts, worships himself like a god, falls on his knees before his own superiority. Such was my art, he says, almost in tears, that I carved a woman, near brought her to life, fell in love with her – and so any man could have done, had he seen her. Such was my grief, and their wonder at what I had done, that the gods themselves took pity on me and made my statue whole.
The long summer drags on, heat blistering the hillsides. The cat dies one day, simply falls over and never gets up. She buries the body herself. The plants in their garden wither and lie stretched out across the dirt, shriveling skeletons of themselves.
But he’s changed – one week he’s drunk every night, and the next he’s still at home after sunset. He seems happy enough, or at least he says nothing, which is new. He spends all his time in the workshop, the little shed behind the house, coming out only for silent meals. Then he goes back to the shed instead of the wineshop – he comes to bed at the same hours, though, sweating and trembling with ecstasy, and she would ask why, but something stops her. He says nothing still; he barely looks at her. Sometimes she thinks he isn’t there at all; he’s locked his soul away and sent his shape to haunt the house.
They spend a month like this, and at the end of the month he’s gone – a periodic trip he takes to visit one of his patrons in the city, some two days north. He mutters his goodbyes and turns away almost shamefully, but the outburst he still half-expects never comes. She stands on the doorstep, watching him grow small in the distance, and before he vanishes entirely she goes into the house.
House to well, well to garden, garden to house; her steps wear a thin path in the dirt between them over the next two days. The heat is too oppressive for anything else, leaving her head aching and her hands slippery, until the second night when it rains. The third morning is bright and painfully clear, and she walks her triangle with the sense of something having lifted, some burden relieved. That afternoon, halfway between the garden and the house, her attention is caught by the shed.
She doesn’t visit the workshop. He’s never forbidden it – not precisely, and why would she go there anyway? She cannot remember it clearly; besides, her past ordinarily interests her no more than her present. Once, she was the cause of his pleasure – was it pleasure? and mute besides, and many other things, but not herself. The workshop holds nothing for her now.
But something about the way the door hangs half-open now intrigues her. The pale grey boards have swollen in the heat and splintered with neglect, and the door swings back and forth, creaking in the wind. Through the crack she sees white marble, and for the first time in her fleshly existence she’s curious.
Her bare feet make no sound on the dry earth between the house and workshop, though the door wails in protest as she pushes it further open. She slips inside the shed, blinking in the gloom. Tools are scattered everywhere, along with burnt-out torches and the remains of charred rags, and some scurrying creature dives further into the darkness at her step.
Even in the dim light the half-formed statue seems to glow. It emerges from the block of stone like a Nereid from the sea, its torso perfectly formed, its neck graceful, its flawless fingers reaching out. Its eyes are only rough divots, its face a mass of bulges, and yet you could swear – you would, if you so much as glanced at the serene and implacable gesture of its hands, the regal set of its head – that it lives. It’s a woman, and it shines in the darkness, suffused with life, yet made of stone.
And now she knows where his nights went, what ate his thoughts away so only half of him slept beside her. She knows what he sacrificed his words to, his wine to, all his arrogance to. At first she refuses to believe it – but why should she? She can see; he gave her eyes, and the gods gave them life. To shut them now requires far more humanity than she admits to having.
She approaches the statue and stoops, not too close, to make sure of the truth. Letters are carved into the base of the statue, a half-finished inscription. She looks away.
So. The perfect woman isn’t enough for him – he must conjure a goddess, a muse, out of stone. She knows the name on the pedestal, or what it’s meant to be, but she won’t say it.
She backs out of the shed, shuts the door behind her, but the wind blows it open again so those empty eyes stare blindly back at her. There is divinity in those holes, but he couldn’t help himself, he carved adoration there too; the hollows burn with love, but not for her. She slams the door shut again and wedges a rock up against it.
He believes he can bind one of them to his will, to fill up a statue according to his wish, or to create a deity of his own, that he can bend the laws of life and stone – no, it doesn’t matter what he believes or what he thinks the gods will grant him; only those eyes matter, those accursed cavities waiting to blink, waiting for him.
Were she a stone now, she would not, could not care. Being flesh, she has no choice.
“Traitor,” she says out loud, and again, slowly, “traitor.”
The wind stirs in the olive tree, and is gone, leaving only the rasping of insects in the grass. She turns and goes into the house.
The proper words come to her much later, where she lies sleepless in bed, and she whispers them to the darkness.
Make me a curse, she prays. Give me a curse, for I am stone, and I have none.
It doesn’t matter what answers – though she has her own hopes. In the morning she may offer up a dove to make sure of things.
For there are places, he once told her, where Aphrodite is worshipped as a stone, feared instead of mocked. Bitter prayers stir the goddess in that form; cries for vengeance please her. People tremble in front of the stone, and pour blood down its curves in long slick trails, and if it smiles then none can tell.
Such is love.
* * *
He returns two days later, satisfied. His patron agreed to some deal, a frieze, some dinner of his depicted with nymphs or satyrs or both; she can’t remember and doesn’t care. Nor would he notice if she had; as soon as he’s eaten he goes out to the workshop, and she hears the slow scrape of his chisel, the silence as he pictures the statue, deciding what to carve next. He comes to bed late only to lie there awake, uneasy and contemptuous of sleep, while she shuts her eyes and dreams of the quietness of marble.
In the following days his skin is faintly grey – with tiredness, maybe, though a strange kind of grey that never turns red in the sun. He complains about the heat, now returned with a vengeance. The mountains were much cooler; here the grass crackles underfoot and the air chokes a man, one of these days he’ll move to the city; why he ever thought it would be pleasant to live out in the middle of nowhere with a statue woman and a cat he doesn’t know. And where’s the blasted cat, anyway?
She points at the small mound of dirt under the olive tree.
Of course, he says, and goes off to get drunk on the wineskin he’s brought home from the wineshop. She hears him crying and clattering about in the workshop until long after dark, making wild promises to the new statue.
She’s the first to notice the patches of stone on the backs of his hands. At first he thinks it’s only dust and tries to scrub it away – she finds him hunched over a bucket of water behind the shed, his hands red and raw and bloody. But no matter what he does, the stone remains.
He seems unsure whether it’s a gift or a curse, but after several hours of discussion with himself and several full wineskins, he declares that the gods have favoured him once more, as they should, as is only proper. The stone appears in spots all over his body, misshapen blots on his legs, back, and neck. It’s a particularly pitiable grey, nothing unique.
Soon enough, he begins to creak, reeling for a moment when he stands up. He moves stiffly, painfully – one leg has already wholly petrified. The stone blooms on his face, an unsightly patch crawling up to his right eye. The eye itself twitches uncontrollably, clouding and leaking stone dust.
He desires her as he used to, before he knew what he’d made of her. One morning he comes up to her at the well, putting out a hand to touch her lips, and she flinches away from the rasp of the stone.
Won’t have me now, will you? She moves away, too quickly for him to follow, bucket balanced against her hip. Now I’m half stone, I’m not good enough for you?
She looks at him coolly, his leaking eye and crooked stance, the mottled patches of grey subsuming his skin.
You are not beautiful, she says, and leaves him tottering around the well.
She pities him at first, frightened as he is when he realises he’s been given no gift. She finds her pity turn to disgust as the stone overtakes him, warps him. His face is irregular, asymmetrical, unpleasing in stone; his body is full of lumps and hollows in all the wrong places. The distaste when she looks at him is almost unbearable – and still the stone spreads, a commonplace stone, veined with brown.
His entire lower body is living stone now; he grates as he walks, lifting each leg from the hip awkwardly, careful not to fall lest he crack and chip himself away. To look over his shoulder he turns his entire body, revolving like a jar on a potter’s wheel. His fingers rasp and click restlessly – the stone has calcified the fingers, which he moves with great effort. He stops work on the statue, since he can no longer manipulate the chisel, and he’s resorted to spending all his time in the workshop praying, atoning for all the sins he can remember. He can’t slit a bird’s throat to make sacrifice either, so he crushes their heads with his hands, weeping and imploring the gods to have mercy on him all the while.
Remember me, he says, remember me, and she echoes his words where she kneels in the garden, sweating and sick under the blinding sun.
The world is airless and hot, the grass withered brown. Clouds gather over the hills sometimes, great black clouds that block out the sun and roll threateningly across the sky, but they disperse in the night to drop their rain elsewhere.
At night the two of them lie in bed together with the blanket on the floor. She falls in and out of sleep, while he stares at the ceiling, blinking occasionally. He doesn’t blink much anymore. He never touches her, and rarely speaks except to pray. One night, the bed creaks, and she rolls over to see him faltering towards the corner of the room. He stands there, perfectly still, and after a few moments he begins to snore roughly; after that, he always sleeps standing up.
She visits the statue one morning before he’s awake. There are thin scrapes down its sides where the chisel faltered in his stony hands, but the body is complete, and the face is near it. Only the eyes are still ghostly hollows.
As his tongue turns to stone, his prayers grow hoarse and grating. He falls once in the yard, and as she helps him up his curses are a thing of horror – rasping, groaning human words that vibrate inside his stone body. Only a single small patch of human skin remains above his mouth, shrinking day by day. He sleeps standing in the workshop now: feasting his eyes, she can only guess, on his statue. She refuses to go inside where she could see him at it. Soon he’s stopped praying altogether; his only sounds are curses and a gentle moan she can’t escape hearing, wherever she is.
One day she’s sitting in the house, sewing. Thunder rumbles in the distance, but she has no hope of rain. She drops her needle and kneels to pick it up, and when she rises again she hears him coming: the slow, agonising grate of stone on stone, the thump of each petrified foot on the cracked ground.
She bends her head over her work, drawing the needle in and out of the cloth, correcting the wavering line of stitches. She doesn’t look up, though she knows when he arrives in the doorway. He no longer breathes as such, and today he doesn’t cast a shadow (clouds have long since covered the sun, and the inside of the house is dark), but she feels the mass of him, how he weighs on the earth, and the scrape of his stone.
He stands unmoving, studying her. She was stone once, this woman, and when she came to life she came all at once, stone morphing easily into flawless skin. She was a statue, and then a woman, all in a moment. Was she? Maybe, for the first time, he doubts it.
Was it her? she thinks he wonders. Did she do it? She hears his mouth opening, his tongue chafing against his teeth.
Woman.
She doesn’t look up.
Woman, he says, more insistently. She refuses to look at him, won’t even lift her eyes to his feet.
Ga –
A hideous grinding noise fills the air, and then, silence. She looks up and finds him a statue, his mouth still open as though he would speak, but words have forgotten him.
Thunder cracks overhead, and the skies open. Rain comes down like silver arrows.
* * *
Summer’s gone, and the house is empty. Weeds choke the paths, and overripe olives drop unheeded from the tree.
The statue that was once a sculptor stands in the doorway of the house, mouth gaping open. Already the stone’s begun to crack, and one of its fingers has broken away, as if to allow the passage of something. Birds, seemingly, have nested in its hair, since a few small twigs are hooked behind its ear.
Behind the house the shed still stands, crumbling away, the door swinging and shrieking on its hinges. When it opens the half-born muse can be seen enthroned, the oracle of her cave, regal and assured. She looks at you, the stranger, certain of divinity – certain of your love – but she cannot see; her hands grasp at the world, her eyes are vacant fissures.
The muse is blind.
This is a thing of terrible beauty. Magnificent story!