the girl with a stone Heart

chapter 4

The next thing she noticed was a spangling of what seemed like glinting red dust, or ground glass, in the folds of her dressing gown and her discarded underwear. It was a dull red, like dried blood. At the same time, she noticed that the threads of her underwear appeared to be catching, here and there, on the healing scars. As the phenomenon grew more pronounced, she touched the area tentatively, over the cotton of her knickers. Her fingers felt whorls and ridges, even sharp edges. Each day the bumps and sharpness, far from receding, grew bulkier. One evening, in the unlit twilight, she finally found the nerve to undress and tuck in her chin to stare down at herself. What she saw was a raised shape, like a starfish, like the whirling arms of a nebula. It was the color—or a color—of raw flesh, like an open whip wound or a knife slash. It trembled, because she was trembling, but it was cold to the touch, as cold and hard as glass or stone. From the star-arms, red dust wafted like glamour. She covered herself hastily, as though what was not seen might disappear.

The next day, it felt bigger. The day after, she looked again, in the half-light, and saw that the mark was spreading. It had pushed out ruddy veins into the tired white flesh, threading sponge with crystal. It winked. It was many reds, from ochre to scarlet, from garnet to cinnabar. She was half tempted to insert a fingernail under the veins and chip them off.

She thought of it as “the blemish.” It extended itself—not evenly, but in fits and starts, around her waist, like a shingly girdle pushing long fibrous fingers down toward her groin, thrusting out cysts and gritty coruscations above her pubic hair. There were puckered weals where flesh met what appeared to be stone. What was stone—what else was it?

One day, she found a cluster of greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpit. These she tried to prize away, and failed. They were attached deep within; she felt their stony roots stirring under the skin surface, pulling at her muscles. Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh, making her clothes crackle and rustle. Slowly, slowly, day by quick day, her torso was wrapped in a stony encrustation, like a corselet. She could feel that under the stones her compressed inwards were still fluid and soft, responsive to pain and pressure.

She was surprised at the fatalism with which she had resigned herself to her transformation. It was as though her thoughts and feelings, too, had slowed to stone-speed, nerveless and stolid. There were, increasingly, days when curiosity jostled her horror. One day, one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of rubious spinels, and she thought of jewels before she thought of pustules.