She came to a park—a tamed, urban park, with rose beds and rubbish bins, doggy lavatories and a concrete fountain. The water fell on the cement with a new, intricate music. The smell of a rain squall blew away the wafting warmth of dog shit. She pulled off her hood. Her cheeks were beginning to sprout silica flakes and dendrite fibres, but from a distance she just looked, she thought, like a lumpy old woman. There were droplets of alabaster and peridot clustering in her gray hair like the eggs of some mythic stony louse. She shook her hair free and turned her face up to the branches and the clouds as the rain began. Big drops splashed on her sharp nose; she licked them from stiffening lips between crystalline teeth, with a still-flexible tongue tip, and tasted skywater, mineral and delicious. The lightning came in sheets of metal sheen. The thunder crashed in the sky, and the surface of the woman crackled and creaked in sympathy.
She thought, I need to find a place where I can stand when I am completely solid. I should find a place outside, in the weather.
When would she be, so to speak, dead? When her plump flesh heart stopped pumping the blue blood along the veins of her shifting shape? When the gray and clammy matter of her brain became limestone or graphite? When her brain stem became a column of rutilated quartz? When her eyes became—what? She was inclined to believe that her watching eyes would be the last thing. The phrase came into her head: Those are pearls that were his eyes. A song of grief made fantastic by a sea change. Would her eyes cloud over and become pearls? Pearls were interesting. They were a substance in which the organic met the inorganic, like moss agate.
She had had the idea that the mineral world was one of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. In the beginning, she had thought of her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence. But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, she saw that there were reciprocities, both physical and figurative.
The minds of stone-lovers had colonized stones with organic metaphors, like lichens clinging to them with golden or gray-green florid stains. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammillated, botryoidal, dendrite, hematite. Carnelian is from “carnal.” Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles; phyllite is leafy green. The earth itself is made in part of bones, shells, and diatoms. Ines was returning to it in a form quite different from her mother’s fiery ash. She preferred the parts of her body that were now volcanic glasses, not bony chalk: chabazite, from the Greek for hailstone; obsidian, which, like analcime and garnet, has the perfect icositetrahedral shape.
She visited city squares, and stood experimentally by the rims of fountains and in the entrances of grottoes. She had read of the hidden wildernesses of nineteenth-century graveyards, and it came to her that there, among weeping angels and grieving cherubs, she might find a quiet resting place. So, on a gray day in late winter, she set out on foot, hooded and booted, with her new, indefatigable rolling pace, marble joint in marble socket. As specks of half rain and half snow spat in the fitful wind, she strode in through a wrought-iron gate in a high wall.
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the girl with a stone Heart
Random"stone hearts Contributes nothing, She does nothing"
