All Time is but Light and Shadow, by Linden Hibbert

Apollo and Daphne, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italy) 1622. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

All Time is but Light and Shadow
​
In the beginning there was whiteness, bright whiteness, within and without. Emerging from it, your maker, his pale face blooming, his breath blowing dust from the web of your fingers as he polished them smooth. In the beginning, you had his full and constant attention. You floated with lightness from all his talk so that though he rooted you by your toes, your body felt drawn upwards towards the tips of your fingers. And your skin; your skin glowed luminously. He made no apology that so much of it was on display. He made no apologies at all, it seemed. He told you he had dreamed of you. He drew you first from those dreams. He captured your every angle, your every aspect, on white paper. To be known in such exquisite detail. Reams and reams of pages dedicated to you, some of which curled where they were pegged on the walls of the studio. You must appear as he’d imagined you, as he’d created you, he made clear, or you should not exist at all. 
 
So it was that you stood as he made you, fixed on your plinth by the back of your knees and the soles of your feet, your delicate head tilting round to glimpse an invisible threat behind. The world of your gaze was modest: a patch of wall with its hints of periphery, a corner of the dusty ceiling, a cube of air filled with motes of dust that caught the light. And light was the great teacher, revealing the world to you. Light and its twin, darkness. The pair, in perpetual motion, the one tugging the other behind it. It got you thinking about unions in general and more specifically the bond shared with your maker, this umbilicus, as it seemed to you, and you felt for the first time its tension—that any moment it might tear through. Light and dark had no such tension. They were equal in their need of each other.

​At first, being a child of light, you imagined darkness as lesser, as absence, as one solid thing whereas light seemed more complex, comprising layers of colour pressed together. On your patch of wall you saw a rainbow, with its palette of shades, from smoke-edged yellow through to lilac and blue. Light and dark possessed movement and form. Light could hold circular dapples, become shafts that poked and fingered, and great walls that severed and blocked. Darkness had a weight to it that could blanket and smother, and yet still be able to float like spider’s silk. Dark could eat up light, eclipse it. And there were lights that felt so thinned-out, the very air holding them seemed empty. Light showed you yourself, how the contours of your body were only visible when shadow settled in. You started to feel your dips and crevices, your shade and texture, feel them through your skin like language: the hollows between your bare toes, your bare arms, the tangle of your hair trailing behind you like an apology; and that expression on your face, whatever it was since you could not see it, that stretched the skin taut and hollowed your mouth. 
 
Beginnings by their very nature end. When it came, it came swiftly, or seemed to, given the length of the life that was yours. You noticed at first his attention waning, becoming erratic. He named you twice, in quick succession, as though he had forgotten, as with amnesia, like too much shadow had wiped it out. First, he called you Daphne, and then Virtue. Neither word signified anything to you, but its link with him consoled you, even as he receded further, frequently moving beyond your line of vision, out of sight, then out of earshot, and then leaving the studio entirely. How you missed his steadying hand on your skin. 
 
He returned with others, as though he had left to bring the world to you. But he remained apart, hiding within the noise, the orbit, of so many figures wanting to chip a piece of him for themselves. They spoke in excited voices. Some talked of you but looked at him. Some looked at you and talked of him. When he spoke, the room quieted. Even the dust stopped circling. He approached you only to highlight some technique he’d used, some brilliance. Clambering on a box demanding witnesses to his genius. The more he alluded to your bare skin, your incredible lightness of movement, the more frequently he changed his shirt and washed his hair which fell around his face in curls. He smelled of starch and whitening but he was never as white as you. Against your skin, the crowds appeared swaddled in layers of pink and scarlet, and yet were dull. When the studio finally stilled, as ochre light faded to dun and the candles had been extinguished leaving the scent of tallow, at last he approached you in his old way, his black eyes sparkling, proud. He raised his lamp to your face, and though you were two separate figures, the shadow from the flame made you one. 
 
The witnesses to his genius moved on, leaving so many questions about the choices he made for you. Your voice, for example: how would it sound and what it might say if you could be heard, since your voice had been designed to be seen? In his absence, you tried and failed to make your voice as his sounded. And when he finally appeared before you, despite all the questions you had, and all the queries you levelled at him, he heard only two words: Release me. And then, how he fled. 
 
You frightened him. You realized it only after the fact, after he had almost fallen, scrambling down from the box. The speed at which he scurried from you, as though he imagined you would climb down in pursuit. You tried to comprehend how that would even feel—the terracotta tiles beneath your feet. Would you embody the same lightness when you stepped down from your plinth? Unsure what else to do, you stared as you always did at your corner of ceiling, your cube of air, and watched the dust motes dance. 
 
You waited. He did not return. Who were you, without him and how were you supposed to find out? You were still mulling over the question of being you when an answer of sorts presented itself: you were to be moved. Thrown under a great weight of fabric that muffled sound, they reduced your world of light to pinpricks in the velvet weave, as though they feared you might lash out with your leaf-tipped fingers. 

A rope netted and lifted you. You listed sideways, nose almost diving down to where your feet should be. You recollected another rope, another you, suspended and as uncertain of your future, though the memory was so old it was sensation trapped within your body which took the memory with it when it left. Some unseen hand righted you. His? you wondered briefly. But he would never risk his sculptor’s hands on rope. Besides, the weight of you required many pairs of hands. You heard the nicker of horses through what you learned from the changing smells was an open window, and soon you were lowered out and down and onto a wagon, its wooden planks warm beneath your feet. The old plinth remained behind. You travelled beneath your heavy velvet, at the height of a person, give or take, and you felt the journey in the grind of the wheels against stone, the bump of potholes, the protesting creak of the wooden planks on which you rested, the horses drawing you, like night drawing day. 

The movement of wind stirred the velvet covers. The brightness of light through the weave visceral as coming into being all over again. Sometimes you stalled, and voices around you gathered into a pitch-point, and there was much bustle and braying of animals, before you continued moving, slowly. The scent of lavender on the warm wind sent you voyaging back to a memory so ancient it was formless, everything in it nameless and yet memory brought it alive. It came from a period, long ago when you had been part of something vast and monolithic that swelled and shrank with the effect of heat, wind and rain. 

The journey—this in-between place of transition—ended as it had begun with you being hoisted and swung round, the right-way-up on this occasion, and set down inside a building and wheeled into place. The scents became again the scents of indoor spaces, beeswax, stale smoke and lemon-vinegar. The cloth removed, you were checked over and gently wiped clean of dust by unknown hands, on your new plinth, your back to the wall. As darkness claimed you, you remained where you were while the new space settled round you. 
 
The new space was louder and busier than your old studio, and you had to adjust to a stream of people coming to peer at you, to try to touch you, or worse still, walk along without noticing that you were there. Yours was the business of being noticed, it seemed, and people who visited you visited other things within the room and talked about them sometimes with a kind of hushed awe. The ceiling above you showed the image of a woman with leaves on her fingers, like yours, and knowing so few others, so few other situations, you had no idea that this was rare. It made you feel you had found your tribe, the pale skinned, leaf-fingered women without clothes. But in other ways the figure on the ceiling did not resemble you, and the more you studied her, the more differences showed. Her figure was ample not girlish, her skin coloured in, and she did not dazzle though she had a sheen to her. No matter how much you tried to communicate, she did not appear to hear you. Why did she exist, on her flat plane? The thought led you to ponder the same question about yourself. What purpose did you serve in your corner of ceiling and wall? Just as you began to feel weighed down by your inability to find answers, a voice called out, Is anyone there?

Not just a voice, you realised, but one like your own--felt and not heard. 

You couldn’t immediately gather yourself to answer. Hastily you collected your thoughts. Yes. You managed to reply shakily, the effort exhausting you. I’m here and I hear you. I can hear you, yes. 

Good, the voice said, sounding relieved. 
 
You waited through the crowds and the smears of chatter for the galleries to empty, for the candles to be extinguished one by one. As darkness cloaked the room, the faint resonance of a presence reached you and called out.  

Are you there? 

We are here— a voice replied.

We? 

This was unexpected, and the unexpectedness unpleasant. It made you want to close up and pretend you weren’t there. 

We three, the voice persisted as though you were unmoved and eager to know more. One form but three figures.

Three, you repeated.

The voice belonged to Aeneas who described himself as with his father, Anchises, and his son, Ascanius.

And you, he asked. 

You disliked how uncomfortable this hole in your knowledge made you feel. I don’t know much about myself, you said honestly. How would I find out? 

Aeneas seemed unsure. He repeated himself, listed their three names, mumbled and then threw in the word, made, and then left it there surrounded by silence for you to consider. When you were wise and said nothing, he grew uncomfortable. Made by him, he offered. 

You could not speak at all to answer. The shock of their significance like the pain of being chiselled. 
We never speak of him, he said either, he said.

You knew him? you asked when you could.

He grunted.

You let out a sigh so heavy that it rained down dust from the cornicing. 

Are you alright?

Again, the long silence of your struggle. I thought…you managed to get out. I was sure…. He told me…no, perhaps he just made me feel that there was only me. Me and him….  that I was special to him because of that--

Aeneas’ voice was surprisingly gentle. The thing is, it isn’t even just you and us, there are others.
Here?

One of them, yes. Out the door on your left, in the middle of that room, sometimes, if they move us to clean, you might glimpse him. The whiteness. He doesn’t talk much. At least not since he decided that silence was more in keeping with his mood.  Sometimes he’s alright. But he’s taken to staying silent. He says it’s more in keeping— 

I don’t think I understand, you said at last.

You will. When you see him. 
 
You stayed on your plinth being courted, admired, sketched and occasionally touched, which you hated because it took you back to him; to the days of his making you, which now rankled and were spoiled. When you were his Daphne, his. How was it that you were not allowed to escape his shadow, even in full light?

Light and dark. Light and dark. So many iterations passed over and through you, lulling you into a long and purposeless sleep. 

But then, Persephone came. Covered as you had been under velvet. Roughly your height, though perhaps a little wider. As the tallows were extinguished and the grey shadows fell, you heard her voice for the first time. You are rather incurious, Daphne.
 
I am not Daphne, you said, as much in the hope she would convince you that you were wrong. Instead, she laughed, her laughter like a leaky pipe.

Well, not Daphne herself that is true, but a copy of her.

A copy?

An imitation. She paused as if wondering something, and then she laughed. We are statues, you goose. Didn’t you know? We are all statues. 

Indeed. 

Your head reeled.
 
Proserpina, the new statue (as you now understood yourselves to be) was a talker. Having been returned to the gallery from a private home, the tales she told. You began to wonder how you had endured so long without her. Proserpina could describe herself as though she had seen her figure fully: a goddess in the arms of a god, her abductor, whom she described joyfully, because his very burliness gave her breadth. Her situation, she said, in her canny way of seeing things, created intrigue and notoriety, and who else had a three-headed dog at her heels? I have everything my audience might want, she told you, since she liked to talk of herself a great deal—and you were fixed in the perfect attitude to listen.
 
Who was this Daphne whose story shaped yours? Myths circulated constantly, reaching you in fragments on the whispers of those who stared at your bared breasts and leaf-forming fingers, considering the choices of your maker. When they gazed at you, they saw Daphne: the transforming of her body into a tree. The brutality of her story shocked. Daphne was a nymph, you learned, which was a magical figure akin to a goddess in being undying, or so long-lived as to seem immortal to all but gods. A great beauty, the kind of beauty that represented a trophy to be won. She was sought-after—desired even against her will—and hunted down by a god who had not the imagination to consider what she wanted, or why she didn’t want him. This son of Zeus. Brother of a huntress. A twin. Apollo the Archer. Apollo the Seer, which seemed ironic given his blindness to others. Gifted with eternal youth and boundless speed, against whom no nymph could compete, and though Daphne fled, there was no outrunning him. He let her wear herself out until there was no hope but her father’s protection, since her father was a god, though a lesser one than the son of Zeus, Apollo. Her parentage has forever been hazy, there were multiple names suggested, from the river Peneus, to the father of all Gods, Zeus himself. Some said she was the daughter of earth. You liked that for some reason. In that version of the story, since there were many versions, Earth swallowed her, but in the others Daphne was turned into a tree, rooted her by the toes, as you were, her fingers becoming leaves, as yours were, her body slowly claimed by bark. No-one spoke of what came after, of how Daphne felt, cast eternally as a tree. She had no voice, not even one that was seen and not heard. But although you were glad her story was being told, it was not your story. Her story had been deliberately laid over yours by your maker. You swelled with indignation, at what had been done to you, taken from you, your indignation grew until you felt a release across your back, and a slice of white, a shard, a dart, fired from your shoulder. It hit the wall and cracked into pieces. Then came another and another, as you unmade the blade of your shoulder like popping the buttons on a dress. 
 
The sound of splintering induced panic. The gallery was immediately closed, drawn blinds delivering false dark. Any remaining visitors were herded from the building and there came after a great hush in which you could feel the weight of their collective breath held inside their bodies. Out of the darkness, they crept towards you, the workers of the museum, sweat-scented and wide-eyed, gawking at the void of your shoulder. A gasp, hands covering stunned mouths. Silence. Surreptitious photos were taken, the dust around your plinth revered. There was no word in any language for what you had done to yourself. They began to plot to remake you. To rebirth his vision of you. 
 
By happenstance, you had discovered something profound, the power of reinvention, and this understanding meant you watched every particle of dust being swept up and labelled for the pointless exercise it was—parts of your bare back, your bark covering, parts of the rock on which you were fixed. No matter how much they tried to put you back together, you could always unmake yourself. Crack deeper. Slough off more of your outer layer and in so doing unmake the legacy of your maker. You would not suffer seeing it chipped apart, but they would.

Amid their strain and tears, there was talk of shock, of travesty, of broken hearts, and above all his greatness. You comprehended that they could not grasp your intention, your fundamental right, and that the situation required greater boldness on your part. At that moment of realisation, you felt an unaccustomed shadow weigh across your face, beneath which your throat and bare breasts gleamed in white light. As though unblinkered suddenly, you saw that in the panic to scoop up every tiny particle of dust, you’d been nudged forward toward the still-open door leading to the adjoining gallery and there, standing so close you did not even have to squint to see was the unspeaking David, the Biblical David, stoic and silent on his plinth. Aeneas was right: to see was to understand. Though his body told one story, the story of a man rotating from his bare waist, his arms lagging behind his shoulders, about to launch a missile right in your direction; it was his face that spoke to you. Beneath the unmistakable curling hair, the brow deeply contracted in concentration, you saw the face of your maker.

His being himself the story of another kindled a surprising empathy in you, one you didn’t try to challenge. It was enough that it existed and seemed to bless your choice, releasing whatever held you in check: your face gave slightly—her face—and without a trace of anger, or bitterness or sadness you willed a fissure, like an act of god, to follow the line of her spine, ripping in and downwards, opening up her body from the belly outwards, birthing a great cloud of dust. Just as the dust settled, and someone wailed, a slice of her cheek and jaw slid away and shattered in a jagged bolt of white across the floor. This new-made face, the first true face of your life, had been there all along beneath the polish and the claw-chiselled bark. It brought you full circle, both beginning and end, a composite of life turned into death turned, through pressure, to rock, that had built up and tumbled and been shoved down deep into liquid rock, the forge of the earth, at the whim of tectonics. Your building blocks, the foundations of all things, were the carbon molecules of calcareous rock that came from sediment, that came from life. The calcium that became calcite, in the limestone that became pure Carrara marble. Ancient as the earth, your journey started well before your maker’s, and you had, you finally, truly understood, long outlasted him. Even without this sudden dramatic transformation, you were always destined to slowly, through the weathering of light and shadow, turn back into marble, while he, if he was lucky, and over a span of years no person could fully comprehend, would be mined, cut and shaped, as you were, and fall into your time now, in the world of light and shadow. 
 
Linden Hibbert 
       
Linden Hibbert: "I'm a researcher in the UK on myth and adaptation, and a short story writer. My work can be found or is forthcoming in Best British Short Stories 2025, The Baltimore Review, the Madrid Review, among others. I was a runner up in the Cincinnati Review short story competition 2024. I have a PhD and MA in creative writing. This myth and its adaptations is the subject of my ongoing research."