Her legs now chinked together when she moved. The first apparition of the stony crust outside her clothing was strange and beautiful. She observed its beginnings in the mirror one morning, while brushing her hair: a necklace of veiled swellings above her collarbone, which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from closed lids, and became opal—fire opal, black opal, geyserite, and hydrophane, full of watery light. She found herself preening in the mirror.
She dismissed, with no real hesitation, the idea of consulting the surgeon, or any other doctor. It was, of course, theoretically possible that she was deluded, that the winking gemstones and heaped flakes of her new crust were feverish sparks of her anesthetized brain and grieving spirit. But she didn’t think so—she refuted herself, as Dr. Johnson had refuted Bishop Berkeley, by tapping on stone and hearing the scrape and chink of stone responding. No, what was happening was, it appeared, a unique transformation. She assumed that it would end with the petrifaction of her vital functions. A time would come when she wouldn’t be able to see, or move, or feed herself (which might not matter). But, for the moment, she had grown no more than a carapace. Her joints obeyed her, light went from retina to brain, her budded tongue tasted the food that she still ate.
In her mother’s bedroom there was a cheval glass, the only full-length mirror in the house. At the end of a day’s staring she would suddenly catch sight of a new shimmer of labradorite, six inches long and diamond-shaped, arrived imperceptibly almost, beneath her buttocks where her gaze had not rested.
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the girl with a stone Heart
Random"stone hearts Contributes nothing, She does nothing"
