THE STONE GIRL — LUCY ZHANG
/(Basalt)
The stone girl appears more air than mineral with her cavities and pores of hardened lava trapping dissolved gases, the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Over time, she oxidizes into hematite, taking on a rust-red that mars her grey-black surface. When a child picks up one of her pieces from the dry stack rock wall surrounding a garden of mulch and hyacinths and drops it onto the driveway, not a single piece chips off.
(Travertine)
To some, the stone girl appears more fibrous and concentric, a cream-colored mass of calcium carbonate. They look at her and think yes, years ago, she precipitated to the bottom of a hot spring and now with the water evaporated, she emerges in solidarity, strong enough to forge ancient Roman temples and aqueducts.
(Something else)
Before the sculptor carves into her, he knocks off her limbs, positioning the point of a chisel against her elbow and swinging the mallet in one stroke. Her arm breaks off. When he is satisfied with the general shape, a stump with a few rough edges, he measures the width of her nose, the curve of her lips, the length of her eyelids with calipers, and draws lines marking the removal area. He softens his strikes so he can remove the small parts with precision–excess flesh in her cheeks, the bit of her temporal bone that protrudes a centimeter too far, the bump in her nasal bone. He pushes a riffler across her scalp and carves out locks of hair that extend past her shoulders. She has hair now.
He leaves the sculpture uncovered before retiring to bed, a twin-sized mattress on the floor, next to his toolbox of chisels and wall mirror.
The stone girl watches her reflection as the sculptor snores. She thinks she has never looked so symmetrical, so delicate, and she wonders if this is what having skin is like. Or maybe this newfound fragility is because she stays awake the entire night, waiting for the sun to strike at dawn, for its rays to heat her face.
When the sculptor wakes up the next morning, he notices a crack down the girl’s face: a jagged line between her eyes, off-center and slanted, tearing through her philtrum and off to the edge of her chin–she resembles a Picasso painting. I can work with this, he thinks as he picks up his chisel and attempts to pivot his artistic muse–embrace the asymmetry, work with serrated and pointed and straight edges rather than curves that start and end at the same place. But when he strikes the mallet onto the end of the chisel, a chunk of her face cracks off, falls to the ground, crumbles to unevenly sized chunks and dust. The other half of her face stands upright, its remaining eye staring at him, as though to ask what he’d do next.
Lucy Zhang is a writer, software engineer, and anime fan. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Parentheses Journal, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
