Now. Make a statue of another saint. Manifest another tragic life; place it on a pedestal as a reminder of how shitty life can be. What happened to you, Saint Pelagius? Were you fed to lions? Pierced with arrows? Persecuted because of your sex? Beliefs? Were you beheaded? Did you chastise yourself from society, from love? Should I immortalize you carrying a skull to remind us of our fleeting mortality? With a sword through your heart as a well-meaning observance proclaiming love as a tortured being, often believed to be extinct?

Hellenistic. What happened to the concept of holding art as a testament to human achievement and transcendence? Eros and Psyche intertwined under an olive tree, blissfully unaware of the passage of centuries, or Hercules himself, a testament to courage and brute force, cloaked in lion’s head and club. Or Pallas Athena, ever contemplative, staring out in wisdom, having just sprung from the forehead of Zeus.

Hellenistic. Beauty. Grace. Strength. Love. Wisdom. Extinct.

The sculptor picked up his tools and some clay. Genesis.

Birth

THE SCULPTOR felt at once empty and immeasurably full inside. From the Earth he had created impossibility. Before him stood a rendering so immaculate, so exquisite in detail that it brought pain to his senses. Only from a pure love bordering on obsession could every minute attribute be excavated from his repressed memories.

A war raged inside the sculptor. The combatant armed to fiercely destroy the creation and conversely lay down his life to protect it. Having poured all his being into the conception of the statue, he lay at its naked feet and cried himself softly to a dreamless sleep.

Discovery

THE SCULPTOR awoke with an ache on the left side of his face, cold and hard. Opening his eyes, he recognized a set of toes. Toenails. A broad foot with tendons, each just a barely visible ripple under the skin. Meticulously carved calves inviting a deranged hunger to bite into them. Powerful thighs. He grabbed hold and lifted his face past sleek abdomen, chest, and into the eyes of Nic. Lifting his hand, he gently laid two fingers on the slightly parted lips. “Not real.”

What have you done? Commissioned to birth a saint from stone and you raise your boyfriend from the dead.

“Why’d you have to die?” the sculptor asked, looking up into the cold eyes of the statue. Curling his fingers around the relaxed hand resting at the statue’s side, he raised the other to seek the spot that would make his lover purr: the baby-soft hair in the nape of his neck. The spot that made Nic close his eyes and drop his forehead to meet Marcus’s when touched. But the statue held its position, strong and cold. The soft hair could not be replicated, no matter how skilled the craftsmanship.