8 | Psychopomp Magazine
reproductions were starting to become truly excellent little things, he knew where to find her.
Through the window, her studio absolutely blazed with light—sterile, with a weighty, professional timbre cast by dozens of lamps that she must have just brought in that day. If she’d had any furniture, it would have been pressed to the sides of the room to clear out space for the block of granite that stood, monolithic, at the center of the light. The curious man with the Jr. Astronomer’s telescope struggled to find an angle that would reveal the woman’s floor. Perched upon a water tower, he discovered that the hardwood was covered by hundreds of pictures of Perseus. All night, the woman with the angular face that looked almost geological under extreme light circled and circled the slab, scratching little marks into its surface. The man jumped around on the empty roof to keep warm and wondered how she’d been able to get the monstrous thing into her apartment at all.
The man bought a little place just across from the woman’s window. Hardwood floors and some decent countertops. If he’d had any furniture other than the telescope, it would have been cozy.
When the woman with the dimple and the dazzling array of chisels got tired, she would pull herself close to the hero in the block and sleep against his weight. When the mood struck her, she might kiss a slow line down a few inches of unfinished tricep.
And so the man with the song in his heart and the persistent tickling of a new idea in his head hired a personal trainer—more a physical consultant, really. The physical consultant had worked in movies and enjoyed a towering reputation and a shocking per diem. The man with the intriguing new idea handed the physical consultant a photograph and was shuffled through a gauntlet of underlings who presented him with his next hundred meals and poked and measured him in concentric slices and shouted inspiration at him as he lifted increasingly heavy objects.
Though they wouldn’t admit it, the physical consultant’s underlings were making it up as they