the girl with a stone Heart

prolouge

At first she did not think of stones. Grief made her insubstantial to herself; she felt as if she were flitting lightly from room to room like a moth. The apartment seemed constantly twilit, although it must, she knew, have gone through the usual sequences of sun and shadow over the days and weeks since her mother had died. Her mother—a strong, bright woman—had liked to live among shades of mole and dove. Her mother’s hair had shone silver and ivory. Her eyes had faded from cornflower to forget-me-not. Ines had found her dead one morning, her bloodless fingers resting on an open book, her parchment eyelids down, as though she dozed, a wry grimace on her fine lips, as though she had tasted something not quite nice. She quickly lost this lifelikeness, and became waxy and peaked. Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman in an instant.