10 | Psychopomp Magazine
The woman with the dimple and the passion and the profile and the slow, daily rotation around her apartment so that she was always in the sun had chiseled her slab down to less than half its size. The floor was a lunar landscape of granite fragments. She never wore shoes, and so she paced around the room in a wincing tiptoe. Perseus’ legs and buttocks were, to the untrained eye, complete, worn to smooth realism by many hours of polishing and many more of kissing and clutching and lines traced with fingertips. His torso was still rough, and his arms rougher. His head was a mass of undifferentiated stone. She seemed, at least for now, unwilling to touch it. The man with the aching jaw and the mitten-bandaged fingers found it increasingly difficult to manipulate his telescope. His apartment was now dominated by a gurney and piles of pills to stave off infection and pain. He avoided mirrors because he didn’t want to feel like a rough draft, but his arms were sinewy and his hands felt massive in a stiff, burnt sort of way.
As he lay in the hospital, waiting to be put under for a Preliminary Face Expansion, the doctor sauntered over to his bedside. “You know, this Perseus . . .” he trailed off, waiting for his patient to complete the thought. “He doesn’t have a—” he made a gesture which meant “penis” and then said “Penis.” He gave his patient a meaningful look.
The man shook his head. “The original statue had one.” He slurred through a much-altered mouth. “Better this way.” And he gave the doctor a roguish wink with an eye that was already swollen shut.
The doctor pursed his lips in a faux-Germanic display of consternation. “We can’t know what it looked like.” He drummed his fingers against his stomach. “I suppose it must have been uncircumcised.”
The man with the amorous fog and the apartment full of pain medication considered for a moment and gave a thumbs-up before falling into a pre-surgery nap.
His pharmaceutical wholesaler eventually discovered that the apartment was not, by any standard of licensure, a private medical facility to which Schedule I narcotics