In a small studio above a bakery lived a sculptor named Yvet, who had, years ago, carved a statue of herself out of pale stone, then turned its face to the wall and never looked at it again. She told visitors it was unfinished. She told herself the same thing, though she knew, somewhere under the telling, that it was finished, and that the turning away was the actual unfinished part.
She dusted the statue's shoulders regularly. She never once touched its face.
A young apprentice named Domino came to study under her one spring, and on his second week, while sweeping, he asked the obvious question: why keep an unfinished statue at all, facing nothing, taking up good floor space?
"Some things you're not ready to finish," Yvet said, "but you're also not ready to throw away."
Domino accepted this the way apprentices accept most things their teachers say — politely, and without believing it completely. He noticed, over the following months, that Yvet would sometimes stand near the statue at the end of a long day, not touching it, just standing close enough that her own shadow fell across its turned shoulders.
One evening, after a difficult commission had gone badly, she nudged the statue an inch with her foot — not on purpose, she said, though Domino wasn't sure he believed that either. For just a moment, the late light caught the very edge of the statue's cheek, the part nearest the wall. Yvet looked at that sliver of stone face for the length of one held breath, then turned it carefully back.
"That's enough for tonight," she said, to no one, or to the statue, or to herself. Domino never asked what she meant.
She kept the statue facing the wall for the rest of his apprenticeship. But every year or two, Domino noticed, she'd turn it another careful inch, always putting it back by morning, always dusting the exposed sliver with more care than she dusted anything else in the studio.
Domino went on to become a sculptor himself, in a city far from the bakery, and he kept no turned statues of his own — he preferred, he said, to face things right away. But he thought of Yvet often, especially in the years when he understood, finally, that facing things right away was its own kind of luck, not a virtue, and that some people need a whole lifetime of careful inches just to look at their own face in the proper light.
