a penis. This made the man with the song in his heart feel a little bit better.
He hid just before she returned. Her imitations were more manageable than the original—paragons of Greek masculinity that could be concealed beneath an upturned trash can. The slope of the shoulders was the same, and the self-important tilt of the head, and, by closing time, the chin and the dip of the knee and the veins networking up the arms.
On the third day, the woman with the prodigious sculpting ability and the dimple that appeared on her left cheek only when she was very focused almost spotted the stealthy man with the ever-swelling cardiac melody. He was shaken, and on the morning of the fourth day, he paid to have the spindly potted sapling replaced with a fifteen-year-old spruce. It was rooted in a fountain and its upper limbs bent against the ceiling. Perseus now combated snakes in the shade, but the dimpled woman with the alarming ability to go without food for twelve hours at a stretch didn’t seem to notice.
This went on for weeks, more or less. The woman’s imitations got better and the man’s spruce began to die, forcing him to sneak in early each morning and glue the leaves back to its branches. The man loved the woman, and the woman, more than she loved the museum or the Atrium or the act of sculpting, loved Perseus. The man with a frustrating layer of glue affixed to his hands liked to imagine that Perseus loved him in turn, because it made for a neater triangle, but of course there was no evidence one way or the other. He bribed the security guard and dragged the tree-fountain across the wall so that Perseus’ gaze would fall closer to his general direction.
In the evenings, the transfixed man discovered that the increasingly perfect woman lived alone in an empty studio uptown. He learned her name and her doorman’s name and the numbers for the restaurants she patronized and the things she liked to do in an empty studio, one fact every night before he drove back to his own slanting penthouse. So when she stopped going to the museum, just as the reproductions were starting to become truly excellent little things, he knew where to find her.
Ryan Dull | 7