Source A: The blank stone

For two years, my work at the restoration yard began with other people’s fragments. I numbered broken pieces, carried them between benches and swept up the pale grit that settled into every seam of my clothes. The trained carvers worked beneath the long windows, where the light was strongest. My bench stood beside the loading doors.

I told myself that position did not matter. From there, I could watch the angle at which a chisel was held and hear the change in sound when a blow was too heavy. I sharpened the tools carefully and practised during lunch on scraps intended for the waste skip. My efforts accumulated beneath my bench: half a shell, the corner of a feather, three leaves with veins that wandered uncertainly towards their edges. None had been made for a building. None had been seen by anyone who had not first moved a broom.

The yard was restoring the stone entrance of the town library. Above its doors, rows of carved branches curled around birds, berries and leaves. One leaf had split during removal. It could not be returned to the arch.

On Monday morning, the workshop manager placed the damaged carving on my bench. Its surface was dark with age, but the broken edge showed a clean interior.

“You’ve been studying this,” he said.

I thought he was warning me not to neglect my work. Then he pushed a new block of stone across the bench.

“Cut the replacement.”

The block was scarcely larger than a loaf of bread. Even so, it seemed to occupy the entire yard. Behind the manager, hammers continued to rise and fall. Nobody turned towards me. I put one hand on the stone to stop myself asking whether he had confused me with someone else.

The original leaf was not grand. It would sit above eye level, one small shape among dozens. Most people entering the library would never notice it. I knew this, yet the task felt enormous. For the first time, something I made would leave the shelter of the workshop. Rain would reach it. Strangers would walk beneath it. Long after the dust had been washed from my hair, one of my decisions would remain over those doors.

I began by drawing the outline. The first line looked timid, so I wiped it away. The second looked too certain, as though confidence could be borrowed merely by pressing harder. On the third attempt, I stopped trying to prove anything and looked properly at the damaged leaf: the blunt tip, the uneven lobes and the central vein bending slightly to the left.

Stone did not forgive hurry. Each tap sent a small white pulse across the bench. I removed the surface grain by grain, creating the leaf through everything I was willing to take away. By the afternoon, its outline had emerged, but the veins were still trapped inside the block.

The next morning, the manager examined it without speaking. His thumb travelled along one edge. I waited for him to return the work to a trained carver.

“Keep the left side heavier,” he said at last. “It has to be seen from below.”

He walked away. The instruction was a correction, but it was also permission to continue.

For three days, the rest of the yard narrowed to the space between my hand and the chisel. I began to recognise the stone’s different voices: the flat knock of a safe strike, the sharper note that warned of a hidden weakness. Near the tip, a thin flake lifted where it should not have moved. I froze. One more careless blow could have split the leaf and closed the brief door the manager had opened.

I changed tools and worked around the weakness. When the last vein finally met the edge, I did not feel triumphant. I felt emptied, as though my concentration had been another material carved away from me.

The leaf was fixed above the library entrance early the following week. From the pavement, it appeared smaller than it had on my bench. Commuters passed beneath it without looking up. A delivery cyclist leaned against the doorway while checking a list. The town continued with complete indifference.

There was no signature on the stone, and no reason for anyone to know that it was mine. But I could identify the slight weight on its left side and the vein that bent away from the others. The leaf belonged to the arch now. Standing beneath it, I understood that I belonged to the work as well.