Author’s Note: The “Pygmalion” myth is the story of a young sculptor (Pygmalion) who falls in love with a statue he creates, believing “her” to be the ideal woman. He names her Galatea (meaning, “she who is milk white”), and he utterly adores her and brings her gifts. Eventually the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite, takes pity on him and brings the statue to life as a real, flesh-and-blood woman. Galatea reciprocates Pygmalion’s love, and the two marry, have a child, and presumably live happily ever after together. It’s a lovely, terribly romantic story that I do love in its original form; nonetheless, I thought I’d try it from a different angle…
I was already dwelling inside the stone when he “created” me. My outward form was different then, to be sure—rough, chipped, stained, weather-worn—but it was me. All along.
When I came into his possession, I enjoyed the way he would look at me, his eyes alight with the potential he saw, yet shaded in humility of what he himself might achieve. He never doubted me, only his own actions.
From the beginning it was a labor of true love, the sculptor and me, he placing his hands upon me, circling me to summon what could come out, and I standing patiently, quietly, liking the way his hands felt. I may have felt cold to the touch, but he warmed me, his oils seeping into my pores to give me a luster I’d never outwardly known. He gazed into me so intently, caressed me so fondly.
And then, he began chipping away. In place of the soft beds of fingertips and palm, I felt the rigid steel of his instrument, the chisel wearing me down from the outside-in. I stood in mute terror as I watched my outer fortification crumble, pieces of me clattering to the ground like so much rubble. At the end of each day, he would clear the debris and thereby banish bits of what made me ME. I had lost my natural coloring, along with the scars of my environment and experience, and the ridges and dips that used to catch the warm rainfall—send it trickling down the ivy with which I was clad to sprinkle just lightly on the delicate grasses at my base—were smoothed and buffed into curves and mounds untrue to me. I would peer from my pedestal, beseeching him to look at and touch me the way he once did when he glorified me for what I was and could become, believing what we saw was the same. And still he would chip and hammer and chisel away.
Yes, I had loved him, and he had loved me, but his spiraling admiration evolved into something foreign. As my figure slimmed and limbs emerged, I saw marble tendrils tumbling down my backside, coiling from what I supposed had become my “head,” and what had been so raw and naked and pure of my surface was likewise sculpted into imitation of silk in motion that puddled at my “feet.” The dust of my own decay choking my once porous flesh, I was stifled, and the more imprisoned I came to feel, the more he appeared to delight in the look of me.
In my state of paralysis, I looked on with no choice, in disgust of the way his ravenous eyes now consumed me, no longer meeting my gaze, but gawking at the swells above my midsection and seeming to imagine what was concealed beneath the draping folds of my “gown.” He would stare at me hungrily, fingering his tools as though contemplating whether he ought to just refine my stone away further to see what he really wanted to, and at times I felt that he would. It was at such times he would throw his implements down into my dust and approach me with hands in the way I had so long hoped he would again. Yet his touch was not one of affection as he groped my swells, ran a finger down my curves, and forced his tongue onto what he’d sculpted to look like lips on me; the warmth and moisture he projected onto me at these times were certainly not what I’d once felt. Unsatisfied, he would fall away and moan and pull at his hair and raise a hand as if to strike me, only to sink to the earth among the gravel of my former self and weep over his unrequited physical love. I would not see him for days after spells like these, but he always did return, gawking anew and repeating the futile cycle.
When he’d determined he had “completed” me, he tested another means of seduction. He brought me gifts, laying them one by one at my feet in expectation that I’d yield to him, disregarding wholly that all I would ever accept from him was not what would die and disintegrate along with this mortal world, but that which would transcend the heavens into the infinite.
By this time I had hardened to him. I was aloof, detached, even colder to his touch. I almost came to delight now in the way my new exterior would allure him, tease him, send him right back into pitiful despair. I once had hoped he would, in his most desperate of moments, affix his chisel to the heart that refused to offer me real love and drive it in to take his life as he had taken mine. Yes, this had become something I’d wanted badly, and I prayed to the gods that one of them would come to my aid.
And She did.
As the sculptor slept, snoring away in his miserable stupor, Aphrodite descended unto me, asking me, “My dear Galatea, what is it you request of me?”
“I desire that you please take pity on poor Pygmalion lying there. Go to him, and bid him what it is he requests. He has endeavored so much to deserve that which should come to him.”
Aphrodite smugly responded, “I shall go to him, but I alone will determine the merits of his request.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded, and left the goddess to take matters into her own divine hands.
By sunset of the following day, as the sun bled red into the purity of a periwinkle sky, Aphrodite had given Pygmalion exactly what he deserved. I stepped off my pedestal, feeling the residue of my identity poking and scratching underfoot, and I allowed Pygmalion to hold me. I allowed him to marry me. And I allowed him to make love to me.
At first.
Intercourse led to weight-gain when I conceived and bore our child, and I lifted not a finger to regain the figure he’d once bound me within.
Coursing with the blood through my human veins was my human temperament, and I berated him for any way I deemed him lax in his vows. My aging skin became dry, calloused, and I turned an icy shoulder to him in the marital bed. The next strike of my hammer was to jealously forbid him from sculpting any more females. His livelihood impacted for the worse, he then resorted to whatever odd employment could provide for us, skipping his own meager meals such that his wife and son could have the more. It was still never enough, and you can be sure I informed him of as much at every opportunity.
Dejected, he drank himself to near ruin and began to rot from within. The first organs to go were his eyes, and I was lost to his sight forever.
That is when I felt the fissure, almost heard its sizzling crack.
Coursing with the blood through my human veins was now my human compassion, and I berated myself. The streaming corpuscles surged with strengthened force, eroding the rock that had calcified inside my chest until the fracture widened, deepened…and broke my heart.
I moved to sit beside him, to clasp my warm palm against his and press my fingertips into his sun-leathered skin, feeling the fine, frail bones of his hand. After a time, I lifted it to my breast such that he could feel the gentle pulse that did beat there. I watched the subtle shifts and twitchings of muscle underlying his face, waiting for them to betray the pleasure he once took in laying his hands upon my curvature in this way. Watching, I waited.
All I detected was a slight furrow of the brow before Pygmalion released his hand from mine and raised it with his other to my own forehead, to my temples, to my cheeks, my jaw, my lips. From then on he would only touch my face to know my expressions, to pinch my chin with affection or to dry away my tears.
I liked the way his hands felt, and I emerged from the stone I had been dwelling inside when he loved me.
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