5.5

 Her fingertips hovered just above the smooth surface before settling against it. The stone was warm, as if the block had sat under a Tuscan sun for an afternoon and was now radiating the heat back into the night air. She was expecting movement, but the stone was almost startling in its stillness, but as she traced the contours, the silence began to break. With her eyes closed, it was no longer a matter of light and shadow, of outlines and perspective. Under her fingers, even gloved as they were, it was texture, depth, the way ridges caught beneath her nails, the way hollows invited her hand to linger.

She felt the sweep of a curve first. A cloak? No. The long, woollen duster coat she’d worn when she first attended college, left in her room when her old girlfriend Wendy had left too swiftly on warm, autumnal morning. What had happened to that coat? She’d worn it to her university classes all through the first year then lost track of it after Wendy’s scent fell away, replaced by stale tobacco, weed, turpentine and patchouli. Chances are she’d left it behind after some sordid assignation, whether for money or not, during the final few weeks when she was more focused on gaining experience than expertise.

She moved on, feeling the folds of cloth as it billowed behind the figure in a strong wing of the kind they used to get in the quad between the buildings when once a week they had to leave the Faculty of Art and troop across the barriered dual carriageway to the main campus where the compulsory class of Business Legals was taught, their class of colourful peacocks  standing out in contrast with the lecture hall of Accounting students, each one in white shirt or blouse and black business skirts.  The coat curved outward, strong yet delicate, carved in shallow ridges, each line distinct beneath her touch. and she followed it until her hand met the curve of the figure’s shoulder. The stone was smooth there, polished by time and reverence, as though countless hands had paused in the same place, resting in awe.

Her fingers moved upward, finding the face. The cheeks were high, the mouth parted. She lingered there, sensing the breath that the sculptor had imagined but could never carve. Then she found a tapering length. It extended from the figure’s lips, narrow at her mouth, widening as it reached forward then ending not where she expected, but onto a blankly carved hollow. It was a trumpet, exactly as she’d seen in the photographs of the piece. The discontinuity between what she saw in her mind and what she was feeling seemed to stretch into eternity, as though the note the horn carried could never end.

She listened inwardly. The stone gave no sound, yet in her mind the trumpet rang clear, a note that was both call and promise. She could hear it filling the room, spilling into the rest of the house and bursting free of the doors, out into the road and rising above rooftops. It was a call that summoned, that awakened, and her heart began to hammer under its reverberation.

She opened her eyes as she gasped, her fingers raising from the surface of the sandstone as if scalded. She could still see the stone as had had seen it before, only this time frozen into one aspect of her past and future. It was a facet she hadn't noticed before, not even when she had carefully filmed the whole sequence. Here was the image of herself long dead, skeletal, yet still wearing her old woollen coat and this time blowing a horn through lipless jaws, the bones of her feet dragging behind her figure in the gale from an unseen wind. Paul was right all along. The stone was a carving of an angel, but she was right as well: it was also of her. She was the stone angel, eternal but anything other than ageless.

Her fingers returned to the angel’s coat; no longer a cape billowing behind the figure but wings, each one exquisitely carved in a detail not normally possible on such a small scale. She’d only seen detail like this quite recently, in the images produced by laser on a single grain of rice. Each ridge felt like a heartbeat, each line a pulse. She thought of flight, of ascent, of the way stone could hold the memory of air. She pressed her palm flat against the figure, and for a moment felt as though she too might rise, carried upward by the carved rhythm of horn and feather.