After The Wedding and The Woman Who Could Smell the Future: Two Stories Read online

After the Wedding

  and

  The Woman Who Could Smell the Future...

  Copyright 2015 Alexander Danner

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  After the Wedding

  The Woman Who Could Smell the Future...

  About the Author

  Books by Alexander Danner

  Acknowledgements

  "The Woman Who Could Smell the Future..." was first published in Bound Off: An Audio Literary Magazine, November 2011.

  Cover photo © Kavram | Dreamstime.com - Small Orange Stone Photo

  AFTER THE WEDDING

  ...Pygmalion never sculpted again. What point would there have been? He had already created his masterpiece, his ivory love, that enchanting homunculus who shared his bed. His hands were hers now. His caresses, his passion--all hers. To continue his craft would have been ungrateful, or worse, unfaithful. And so he packed away his chisels, and hammers, and files, into a wooden crate that he did not bother to lock, the lid still half open, casually abandoned to the corner of his workshop. He covered the windows, closed the door. He went home with his wife, and he stayed there.

  As for Galatea, what could she know of Pygmalion's sacrifice, when she herself had been the capstone to his career? She loved him of course--her love for him was carved into her beating heart with the same precision as the slenderness of her fingers, the slope of her thighs, the symmetry of her nose. But it is no easy thing to be wed to one's own creator; born and betrothed in an afternoon, Galatea spent the early months of her marriage in a fog of bewilderment. What must she expect of love? What offering was hers to make?

  When their first child was born, Pygmalion was amazed--that perfection could be his a second time, that perfection could be born of a carnal act, without measurement, or exactitude, or long years of lesser, malformed offspring. As he held his child, he measured her with his hands, and chided himself for it, then measured her again. Galatea, though, was troubled by the birth, certain that her own creation had been nothing of the sort. She was never so small, so pink. She remembered no warm dark womb, no contortion toward freedom, no first shock of air. She remembered only his lips upon hers, and then the paralyzing compulsion to be his, always.

  It was only natural that she would one day heft a hammer, determined to understand how a lover is born.

  She slipped away as she could, while he napped in the garden, or took wine with other men. The workshop awaited her. Pygmalion had never again taken her there, but he had made no secret of its location, its significance. The door fell open at her touch. The wooden crate, its lips still parted in anticipation, beckoned her to take up her husband's disused tools, then opened wide its maw. She worked as she imagined Pygmalion had worked, in a single-minded rage of creation, striving toward that improbable balance of desire and vanity that allows one to fall madly in love with a beauty of one's own deliberate devising.

  And what beauty did she devise? Only Pygmalion himself, over, and over, and over. She sculpted him not as we he was, but as she had been shaped to see him: larger than himself, younger, more beautiful than even he knew he could be. And each time she felt herself crushed by her own delight in seeing his face emerge once more.

  It wasn't until years later that Pygmalion stumbled into the workshop, wine-drunk friends in tow, boasting of his storied prowess, his goddess-given gift. And there he caught Galatea, belly large with a second child and chisel in hand, polishing the contours of a face utterly unrecognizable to the man who wore it. He was sickened by her secret art, by the figure's remarkable physique, by the rough stone with which she chose to work. He denounced the violence of its posture, the brutishness of its hands, the engorgement of its sex. As both husband and artist, he railed against her.

  She listened to his fierce pronouncements for as long as he made them. When he proclaimed that the fruits of her artistry contained no beauty, reflected no beauty, she applied her full strength to believing him. Her strength was not enough; she knew, however many times she placed chisel to stone, only one face would ever be found within. So, when finally Pygmalion had exhausted his arsenal of judgment, she cursed him once for a critic, then dashed the half-formed sculpture on the floor, resolving never to create another, and never to wander beyond the confines of her husband's arms again. She offered no apology, but Pygmalion was appeased by the destruction.

  Still he burned with an unendurable question: Whose hands had shaped the child that filled her womb?

  Pygmalion's love for his wife faltered.

  Her skin became mottled, numb white patches appearing along her arms and torso, a familiar sensation, as soothing as the long still meditations she took the garden, alone and silent. He too sat silently, watching her from doorways and windows, unable to abandon sight of her, yet unwilling to approach, mesmerized and repulsed in equal measure. She still loved him, could not rid herself of her love for him, etched as it was into the grain of her being. But she found solace in the loosening grip of his love for her.

  By the time the child was born, she had little warmth left to her, and she barely cried as the large stone was wrenched from her loins. Pygmalion threw the ugly rock to the floor in disgust, but on striking the ground it cracked open, revealing a live boy nestled inside. The boy's pink skin was no proof in Pygmalion's eyes; he heard the harsh sounding of a chisel in the child's every cry, and he could not love what was not his.

  Pygmalion awoke the next morning to find Galatea rigid in the bed beside him, the mewling child suckling vainly at her ivory breast. She had become unmade.

  He said nothing to the children of this tragedy, told them nothing of how they had become motherless, of how he had forfeited a woman for want of a masterpiece. For the rest of his days, Pygmalion moved her dutifully from bed, to kitchen, to hearth, as the hour of the day demanded, in perfect imitation of life, preserving the shadow that remained of his greatest achievement, his final creation, his only love.

  THE WOMAN WHO COULD SMELL THE FUTURE...

  …understood that she was a joke. A bland pun too weak to merit a groan. A mishap of science with slightly less merit than Silly Putty. If she were in a comic book, she’d be a fourth-rate guest star for a third-rate hero, the sort of heroine who gets killed off in a crassly commercial, multipart, company-wide crossover in order to generate a little bit of cheap shock and posthumous buzz.

  But she wasn’t a comic book heroine, not even a fourth rate one. She was just a girl, with a name (Jordan), and a job (copy writer), and a boyfriend (Mark), and a very small temporal distortion permanently lodged in her left nostril. It wasn’t especially useful. She certainly hadn’t figured out any way to make money from it. You can’t smell lottery numbers or prime stocks. Her power didn’t give her any athletic or artistic talent. You can’t literally “sniff out” crime, no matter what the popular metaphors tell you. In fact, here is a comprehensive list of the uses Jordan had found for her talent:

  1. She always had an umbrella when she was going to need one.

  2. She knew when her friends were planning surprise parties for her (she could smell the candles).

  3. She deftly avoided other people’s flatulence (not much satisfaction there, as she’d have already encountered the odor, hours earlier).

  4. She knew when buildings were going to catch fire.

  This last, of course, seems pretty useful. And it was—over the course of her life, she had doused dozens of fires before they could threaten lives or property. She had even considered becoming a professional firefighter. But fire departments don’t
want people who can predict fires. People who predict fires are usually able to do that only because they set the fires in the first place. After the third time she was investigated for arson, Jordan pretty much gave up trying to warn anyone about fires at all. Instead, she just bought herself a good fire extinguisher, showed up where she was needed, and slipped away before anyone could ask her any questions.

  This had required her to learn a bit of lock-picking as well, but fortunately Jordan was good with her hands. She played a little piano, too.

  So: