Thicker Than Blood

A.S. Byatt in a fiction piece in an October issue of The New Yorker writes about a female character metamorphosed into a stone woman:

That evening she understood that she might be wrong about her immediate fate [...] the bread knife slipped and sliced her stone hand, between finger and thumb. She felt pain, which surprised her, and saw a spurt of hot blood from the wound whose depth she could not gauge. She watched the thick liquid run down the back of her hand, onto the bread, onto the table. It was ruddy-gold, dripping in long glassy strings, and where it touched the bread the bread went up in smoke, and where [...] Her veins were full of molten lava.

I like how the commonplace in this passage is transformed by a simple conceit.

And so for day 530
26.05.2008