bow down

She told me she heard it somewhere (some secondary source she may one day remember but I will never know) that there was a statue waiting inside the block of marble and all she had to do was take the chisel and uncover it, but (she was of this type) it led her to wonder if there was another, smaller, statue within the one she just carved, waiting to get out, and so she cracked what she had polished, hunted for a throughline as though the first form was just a fog hung low over a valley she could not see from the mountainside, and beneath this second form buried in the first (like a child, she guessed, not knowing) but there was another, and another, until the statue fit in the palm of her hand, the brute chisels given up for modified dissection tools and jeweler's brushes, small enough that the only suitable audience was the flies that fell into her hand, but if they saw a still smaller shape in the sliver of stone they never told her, or she never told me, or I'll never tell you.