Changeling by Zara BalrogBalls

The Marble Baby

Letter 1, ‘The Marble Baby’, dated TA 2509

To my remarkable Celebrían, 

The very unique animal you married has already dredged up some doleful statue of you in the grounds, all marble and stone. Your cheeks are too soft in it, I told him. You look like an abnormally tall baby. When he is gone, I look at the statue again and I hate it. It was wrought with tenderness, the soft cheek a mirror-image not of you but of Elrond’s love for you. 

All statues hold properties of the elements which shape them, and this statue is threaded through with marble. Time is irrelevant for her because she is forever frozen in time. She understands only sorrow and cold stone. Her heartbeat never stops because it had never started in the first place. Her first breath has never been taken. She is every parent’s greatest fear: a changeling child. 

I do not want you to be a copy and perhaps he does not notice because he is a twin but you are not. I do not want you to turn to marble. I do not want a tall marble baby. I want my baby. I want my baby. I will give this earth my lands, my crown, my heart, my hands if it returns my child. If it passes her back to me, I will accept any bind placed upon me. I cannot bear to be exiled from my Cello-baby’s world, and her to be exiled from mine. 

I am sorry for such maudlin words, my wonderful girl, but these days all I remember is you. Memory and grief go hand in hand and memory is dizzyingly cyclical and it does not curl outwards but forever inwards, forever retreating. Remember you and I saw that cross-section of the tree trunk, Cello-baby, when you were but ten? Do you remember when I told you that the circles within a tree are a cross-section of all the years it had ever lived? A circular map of time itself. 

I think that is how I see you, now you are away from me. Not a loss but a set of reconfigured memories: a cackle there, a catchphrase here, there, everywhere. That day by the cross-section of the tree, Cello-baby, was it my hand in yours or your hand in mine? I am afraid I left the answer to that question behind. I am afraid it has settled into the grooves of the trunk, too deeply set for excavation. Perhaps Elrond’s statue was not a miscarving. Perhaps he too has lost things to the circular grooves of time. 

I wonder about the botanical forms of grief. The commemorative properties of chrysanthemums. You were always made to be cast in flowers instead of stone. 

Beyond the breaking of this world,

Your Ada