A Shape for Daytime

Wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm, Noémi left just wide enough a gap for the sound of a woodpecker’s drumming to break through. She crooked a smile, placing her chisel and hammer down and creeping over to the window of her one room cottage. It sounded close by, or else she wouldn’t have heard it with the ring of chisel against stone still rhythmically timed to the pulse in her ears. She opened her shutters silently, peering at the likeliest tree - an oak struck the past year by a stray spear of lightning, and left gnarled and damaged since. Perfect for a woodpecker’s nest.

Dusk swirled at the base of the trees, and Noémi leaned against the rough hewn wood of the windowsill, searching. She couldn’t see the bird, but again heard its distinctive beat, the fluid spill of percussion against bark. Little carver.

She pulled the shutters and returned to her bench, considering the shape emerging from her own work. The townsperson had left only a small hunk of limestone, only slightly larger than the accompanying loaf of bread, and as easy to hew sections and slices from. With such a soft stone she envisioned a delicate creature, something with life and curve and minuteness. Her finer chisel soon excavated the nose of a squirrel, its nimble little fingers and the grand, smooth swirl of its tail. She chipped out its feet, claws, the base a simulacrum of a tree branch, then switched to her claw chisel to etch the whorls and rough patterning of bark.

Stone ate hours, Noémi found. She suspected it was how it lasted so long, how even softer rocks might come closer to permanency than so many other things of the world. The element’s appetite for time was insatiable, but she was glad to feed it as best she knew how, as her mother had. She paused her chisel. The metal tip rested against the back of the squirrel’s neck, stirring fur from its shape. There was only silence, the woodpecker long since departed, and the dusk of evening browsing long enough to turn to night.

Noémi brushed away the dust nestled in the recesses, turning the figure this way and that. She held it up to the rafters for the waking nightjars. She didn’t speak to them, her voice a rusty thing in her throat, but showed them her work smilingly as they ruffled their feathers, waking to the night. Noémi set down her squirrel and cast the shutters open again so they could take their leave for hunting, their wings the colour of dried leaves and crinkled moths, interrupted by intelligent shining eyes.

She saw to her own supper of bread and herbed butter, then wrapped herself in a woven blanket left by another townsperson, warm brown and insulating against the night’s coolness. She trundled her wheelbarrow from the side of the cottage to the front door, and placed inside the squirrel, other carvings she had done, and the baskets in which the townspeople left their payments - since emptied, eaten, worn. The path from her house - if it could be called as such, only worn within the width of the barrow’s front wheel - curved and wound away, out of sight of the cottage’s lopsided stones, until the gentle tides of the lake announced the edge of Noémi’s land, their wash and ebb moonlit and quiet. She emerged in a small clearing, the lake’s edge on its other side. The path to town veered off and to the left - to her, as remote as another country. She lowered her barrow.

Noémi arranged her pile of carvings on stumps, logs, and flat pedestal-like stones, turning their faces to the moon. Then, she collected.

Scattered all over the clearing were offerings - as there always were. A box of eggs, more bread, a corked bottle of wine, unlabelled and the glass winking from the grass. Then of course, blocks of stone. Limestone through to granite, small and large, the townspeople left her hunks of rock to turn into what she saw fit, finding the delicacy in the rough and placing it back in their waiting hands. She piled the chunks into her wheelbarrow, including a rather large piece, the length of her arm but only half the width of the wheelbarrow. It would be a

multiple trip night. She was about to roll the first load away when she noticed a package, wrapped in brown paper and string. She unspooled its contents to show a pair of new woolen trousers. She raised an eyebrow, the expression clearing her field of vision as the protuberance over her eyelid was lifted. The trousers’ measurements would be entirely guessed. And likely entirely wrong.

None of Noémi’s lopsided gait, curved spine, and disfigured face had ever been seen in the town, and the woman who raised her - Noémi had grown into some doubts that she was actually her mother - extracted the promise from her that it would stay as such, then died, a rasp in her chest turned unexpectedly lethal over one winter.

Kind heart and ugly face my child, stay out of the world of people. They’ll take what’s good in you and break it trying to match it to the broken outside, they hate what they don’t like to look upon. Promise me, my little monster. Promise me, Noémi.

She held the trousers up and away from her, inspecting the stitching and recognising a craftsperson’s skill, as though through a warped mirror. She held them to her waist. Too big in one leg, and likely just this side of too tight in the other. It wasn’t the fault of the trousers. It wasn’t the fault of anyone.

Ugly.

Broken.

Little monster.

She wheeled her way back to the cottage, following the line drawn and redrawn, and the tiny moons of the nightjars’ eyes in the dark.

*

A long, thin tower of three warblers arcing toward the sky.

A cluster of lime tree leaves, and a tiny beetle, appended in onyx.

A granite frog, so alive the townspeople waited for it to blink. Hop to a distant mountain. Return to the rock and earth.

*

The trousers fit with some creative belting, and with a few weeks of wear the tighter leg was worn to her irregular shapes. She could bend, lift, move around the clearing in them freely, picking up her new load of stone and gifted offerings.

Then she stopped.

Resting on top of a small wedge of stone, only two fists across, was a folded piece of paper. Its crisp pale edges stood out from the dark stone, clear as a beacon and unmistakable.

A letter.

Noémi had never received a letter.

Sir Carver,

I know it is not usually the way of things to make a specific request. Your creations are beautiful, and no one is ever disappointed.

However, my sister’s birthday is coming up, and I was hoping you might make an exception, and use this stone to make her a swan. She has an affinity for swans, and loves how they glide in their pairs, trailing the shimmering paths behind them in the lake.

I ask humbly, yet boldly, I know, and have nothing but the stone itself to offer you, which I know is no payment at all.

Yours and ever hopeful,

Ariane

*

The swan sat on her workbench, next to the preliminary sketch Noémi had eked out. Ariane’s sister liked the glide of swans? Noémi had carved it in elegant curving strokes, and sat it on a round of sanded wood, textured to show ripples in the lime grain. The swan was easy. The stone was always easy.

She hesitated, her square block of a hand around a stub of her sketching charcoal. Her shadow was lumpen and blurry at the edges, holding its own writing utensil. The nightjars dozed in the rafters, full of their hunted insects and satiated. The only sound was Noémi’s breathing and the mocking laugh of the fire dancing on her candle’s wick.

What to write?

*

The group approached the clearing in the early afternoon, the borders of the trees limned in gentle glow, inflected with green from trees and trees beyond. They chatted as they collected their emptied baskets, their new sculptures and carved tablets.

A gasp.

“Ariane?” One of the townspeople rushed to her but she held up her hand. “It is fine, I only…”

Only? She held the swan, adhered to its wooden lake. Its peaceful eye was closed, the sweep of its feathered wing drawn close to its side like a child’s lashes as they fell into sleep. This was why the town so respected their carver. Not just because he made beautiful things, but because he made rock something else altogether. Stone alchemy, breathing life into the rigid, harnessing its permanence but giving it a moment of its own. Creating moments.

She stroked a finger down the swan’s long neck, then swallowed the lump in her throat, batting her dark hair out of her eyes and shielding the sculpture close to her chest, secretive where the others all cooed and shared glances of their newest acquisitions. She shuffled the weight of it between her hands and felt an incongruous rasp and rustle along the bottom. A curl of paper.

Ariane,

I am no Sir, and my name is not “Carver”.

If you wish to pay, please. Write me again. Tell me about the town.

Noémi

Ariane paused. “Noémi,” she murmured. The other townspeople were gearing up to leave, to return to the town the reclusive crafter wanted stories about. She glanced at the letter once more, the hand as beautiful as the sculpture, for all it was scratched out in rough obsidian charcoal. The corners of her mouth twitched, and she picked her way back to the others.

Post script - a happy birthday to your sister.

*

A hare, standing on its hind legs, ears erect and aware.

A tablet inscribed with the rounded, layered feathers of the honey buzzard’s wing. Its golden eye painted and glinting.

A spray of apple blossom, delicate as cloud, heavy in the hand.

*

They traded letters as the forest traded young spring for buoyant summer, quiet whistles for brassy trumpeting and wild colour. Noémi received her stories. She created a cartography of the mind with each new addition - the bookbinder’s shop across from the butcher, the competing carpenters side by side. Stone everywhere - she was surprised to hear, for the buildings, but underfoot as well, uneven in size and spacing. The little church Ariane spoke of fondly, with doors always open and voices ringing out.

Noémi carved a tiny damselfly, working hard and patiently at the wings to try and bring their translucency to stone. She weighted her letters down with it in the clearing, and it sat waiting for Ariane’s in return. Miniscule postmaster.

It was some months when it delivered on Noémi’s fear.

I would like to see you, my new friend, Ariane wrote. To meet.

And Noémi broke her promise.

She sat by the lake, perched on a log with reeds at either side. They swayed gently in the breeze, like hair under water. She pressed her feet to the ground, her knees bent and her already curved spine hunching further as she curled around herself. Her long arm hugged everything closer, and she imagined herself shrinking, shrinking until she could fit inside an acorn.

The weather had been strange all day, and the sunset leaked in murky violet across the sky. The water was the colour of olives. Quiet, but for the reeds. Damselflies like the one she had carved danced around the surface near where she sat, peering into the looking glass for a snatch of their own colours, their own speed and effervescence. Noémi did not look. She knew what there was to see. Lumps and scarring and distortion of design.

Ugly little monster.

She breathed in, long and deep through her nose, tilting her head back and letting it loll back towards her chest on the outbreath, tried to expel the anxiety wriggling across her skin. Her gaze caught on the lake’s swans as they descended from their roost on the far side, a waddle, waddle, small splash. Noémi observed them, how their paddling smoothed until they floated in paths of uninterrupted ribbons, satin curves. They threaded around each other, something serpentine in the motion, and Noémi was entranced by their shapes. Not the shape of their necks, their snowy feathers, the bright orange of their beaks - but the shapes they drew. The shapes they were making.

The undergrowth rustled off to her left and Noémi jumped, turning to look. A snatch of movement departed like a thief from her eye, the sound of running through the trees. Noémi stood, frozen, listening until there was nothing to listen to and her heartbeat slowed. She sat down on the log again. A deer perhaps. A skittish roe unexpectant of her presence there.

Likely a deer.

Noémi sat on her log and waited. She watched the swans. She watched the lake ripen in the dark. Turn to glass. Turn to night.

*

A roe deer.

A roe deer.

A roe deer.

*

The damselfly lay undisturbed, for a day, for several. A week.

Noémi glanced over in its direction, not expecting to see anything as she collected new lumps of stone, a basket of apple pastries. But there was something. At last, there was something. Noémi dropped her stones, the pastries spilling like lost pinwheels in the grass. She lifted the damselfly.

*

Ariane joined the townspeople on the next journey out to the stonecarver’s glen. She rubbed the fabric of her skirt between her forefinger and thumb as they tramped through the forest, the other townspeople as laden as usual, looking at her askance for her empty, worried hands.

The creature she had seen at the lakeside was so far from what she expected. Noémi had mentioned she had some disfigurements, but Ariane had guessed at a scar, perhaps a strange arrangement of teeth or a crookedness to her eye. She was something wholly else altogether. Something Ariane couldn’t match to the delightful hand that wrote her letters.

She wanted to help her.

The group wandered into the clearing, but piled up, fronts colliding with backs and a grumble rising.

“What is it?”

“My foot!”

“What’s happening?”

“I - “ the leader of the party pointed, and Ariane followed the gesture to a large wooden placard, nailed to a post and hammered into the earth at the dead centre of the clearing. The others murmured, and Ariane slipped between the bodies to the front, trying to see, trying to read.

“What does this mean?”

“You know what it means, it seems plain to me.”

“Yes, but. I don’t understand. Why would the carver just…stop? After so many years, it doesn’t make sense.”

The townspeople argued behind her as Ariane paced to the sign.

No more carving. Leave nothing. Go away.

Ariane leaned down, retrieving what was left at the post’s foot. She only wanted to help. She brushed a blade of grass from her Bible, returned, the damselfly nowhere in sight. She wondered what Noémi had done with it, their little letter friend.

*

The townspeople ignored the sign. The rest of summer saw their offerings offered and their stones planted in the clearing as always. The sun beat down on the baskets of eggs, cheese, bread, fruit - anything that wasn’t scavenged and tossed by the forest wildlife went to rot. The clearing and lake, once a peaceable retreat, took on a putrid, deathly smell, and by the autumn, the offerings ceased. But the stones continued.

By the first browning leaf’s fall, the clearing was a cemetery without bodies, nothing to commemorate. Common and valuable alike, soft, hard, small, large - the stones stood where they were laid. Unmoved. They cast deep, overlapping shadows, an ineffective sundial of many arms. Sandstone, serpentine, onyx. Granite - though some townspeople wondered at the appeal of something so difficult to carve for their reluctant mason. Others took the opposite view.

“I know where we can find just the thing. A real test of craftsmanship, the carver will have to come out to prove his mettle, if he has any pride at all.”

The mayor gathered a group of sturdy men, and returned to town within the day with a column of basalt in a cart, the wheels slow to turn under its weight. Their tallest man, the candlemaker, himself with the appearance of a taper, was shorter than the great column by about a head, and it took six of them to lift it onto the cart. They left it in the clearing, cart and all.

When two young boys ran to the mayor’s home days later, reporting the cart was missing from the clearing, he smiled. And the town waited.

Then winter arrived, and the stone carver slipped from focus, minds turned to weathering the cold, dark months. The waiting ceased. The time continued to pass.

*

The mayor was well versed in having fingers in many pies. A man was sent each week to check the clearing for developments. On the eve of Spring, the man lost his breath and gained a message.

“The sign!” he puffed, “the sign is repainted.”

The mayor leaned forward, a spark of excitement fanned within him. “What does it say?”

“To come, three days from now in the afternoon. The basalt creation is ready.”

The news spread before the mayor could announce it, and the townspeople prepared to make a day of the event. Picnic baskets were lined with buns, fresh greens, mature cheese in burnished gold and veiny blue. Ariane heard it from a pew ahead, head reverently bowed and ears pricking. At last, things could go back to normal, back before her fireplace knew the ashes of a season’s letters. Before the stone breathed.

Children, rarely part of the envoy to the carver, skipped out ahead, darting between the trees as parents called out for care, to not go too far. The excitement hummed like a cloud of bees over the assembled crowd - it was like a town festival, on the move. The mayor kept his walk restrained, though his heart leapt out ahead, drenched in curiosity as to what happened to his basalt, a pillar of called-in favours. Just before disappearing, the carver seemed to take a shine to roe deer, dainty legged and big-eyed. The mayor tended a secret hope that a great stag might emerge from his stone gift, polished antlers high and suitable for display in the centre of town, a tasteful plaque below to indicate his sponsorship of its majesty. But who could say? Wagers had circulated through the town as to what the carver would deliver, each as different and earnest in their guesses as the last.

The mayor stepped out ahead when they reached the last stretch of treeline, calling for attention.

“Gathered friends!” He spread his arms wide, invoking the pulpit as the child within him vibrated with excitement. “It is a joy to see so many of us united on this long-awaited day. Our reclusive forest artist has returned to us!”

A cheer.

He smiled on the crowd, beneficent. Impatient.

“Let us celebrate!” He turned on his heel and confidently strode into the clearing, followed by all. A scream erupted as his own lips parted, a strange collision of ventriloquism and being one of a crowd.

The stone gleamed. Polished to a high black sheen, it drew in the Spring sunlight and kept it, covetous and overwhelming. It was a swan. But unlike a swan any of them had seen. Its legs were visible, corded and muscular, the talons sharp and forbidding. The swan stood powerfully upon its weaponry, sturdy enough to hold its wings aloft. They curved up and

inwards, poised to attack, the feathers not graceful, but threatening, each individually articulated so dutifully the townspeople looked at it and couldn’t see any possibility but life. The long neck ranged forward so the head arced towards them, following the wings’ attack. The beak was open on a hiss, the tongue a spear surrounded by jagged, unruly fangs - an ugly creative flourish.

“It’s hideous!”

“A monster.”

But they could not stop looking at it. The children clung to their parents’ legs, but peeped around them for another fearful glance. The mayor’s mouth had not closed, eyes roving. And Ariane -

Ariane saw her first.

Noémi emerged from the clearing’s opposite side, and walked into clear view. Whispers began as though stirred by a passing breeze, until she came close enough to see, and gasps, shouts, muffled curses hit the air.

She walked with a limp, and dignity, the confusing shapes of her face raised to the crowd as she drew level with her creation. She stroked its frenetic wing blade.

“Are you this town’s stone carver?” A shout from the crowd. Objections and agreements.

She nodded. “I was, once.”

Many flinched as she spoke, her voice like theirs, and others questioned her words. A few broke and drifted back through the forest, departing the crowd with curious children bundled against them. The mayor stood rooted to the ground, surveying this strange creature

and her stranger creation. A large pack crested her back, resting off centre of her befuddling spine. A belt looped her waist, threaded with an assortment of mallets, chisels, thin picks.

“Once?” he stepped forward. “Are you not still?”

Someone’s hand brushed his back, a silent plea to retreat. He ignored it, glancing again towards the fearsome swan. It was not what he pictured. It was not what he wanted. But it had that same glimmer about the eye, the same movement as all her other pieces, that singular spark of elevating stone above the earth and raising it celestial.

Noémi didn’t reply. She walked forward. More gasps from the crowd as she closed the distance, hobbling with her strange gait. The townspeople parted, a path carved for the carver without a tool in hand. Ariane searched out her eyes as she passed close by her, closer than that night at the lakeside, but Noémi didn’t see. She was not searching for any gaze, but looking towards the horizon with a broken promise in her pocket, and a new one to make it worth it.

She left in the daytime with her tools and her talent.

*

Nightjar.

A mirror frame.

A face like her own.