and melted from the fire's heat, puddling beneath my feet. I rose early and chiseled through wintry days into night by candlelight. With aching hands, fingers numbed by cold, I cursed my gloves and threw them to the muddy floor. Sleep failed me; I worked as in a fever. In the window's icy glare the translucent stone haunted days and nights. Awakening, it breathed and cleaved to burst from stillness into life. A sleeping visage began to form then sinew, muscle and bone; I honed the emaciated son. As in a warp in time, I fit finer lines of veins, eyes, hair, lips, hands, the punctures of the nails. Tentatively, spring crept into my little room, warming light at last! I unhinged the shutters and began to polish the malleable marble. With chalky pumice I rubbed and rubbed the folds in clothing and limbs. For weeks I rubbed, all summer I rubbed until my fingers faltered. Finally, the marble stone shone with a silken tone, like newborn flesh. My feat complete with muscles spent, emotions rent I yearned for the raging pyre, consuming fire of sculpting my Pieta once again; for I did not want to let it go so I signed it for the world to know Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence made this. ________________________________________________________________________ Sylvia Williams Dodgen, an Alabama native, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Alabama. She won second in State in the 2012 Hackney Literary Awards for a short story entitled, "The Best They Know How." She is retired and writes in Orange Beach, Alabama.
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