Sinopsis
He creates a sculpture of the perfect woman and dreams her alive. Inspired by Ovid’s Pygmalion, Miss Marble tells the tale of a sculptor, who sculpts the perfect woman. The marble beauty is cold to the touch but in the sculptor's dreams she comes alive. Overwhelmed by love and lust, the sculptor makes an appeal to Venus, the goddess of love.
~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~
The sculptor adored women but they frightened him. In every woman he saw wickedness. Their voices, faces and gestures arachnoid. Their hair a web with which to trap him and their perfume was a floating, haunting horror. Everything about women alarmed him. So he lived alone, shunning women; too fearful to marry he remained wifeless. And yet, he dreamed. He dreamed awake and he dreamed asleep. He dreamed of the perfect body of the perfect woman. He dreamed the woman, sick and tired of unbeing, into being and she took possession of his body to find herself a life. She moved into his hands and claimed ownership of his fingers. She filled his mind, clamoured his thoughts all day and all night. Eventually he began to sculpt; he imagined the perfect woman and his fingers and hands began his life’s work. Sleeping and waking he toiled until a life-size, perfect marble figure lay in his studio, dressed in ivory as if alive. He had created a woman, lovelier than any living soul and when he gazed at her, as if coming awake, he fell in love.
His own art amazed him. She was so real, she might have moved. Only her modesty, her sole garment, invisible, woven from the fabric of his dream, prevented her, as if a little ashamed, from stepping into life. And then his love for this woman, so obviously a woman, became his life. He caressed her, dominated by the quest of searching for the warmth of living flesh. His fingertip whorls filtering out the feel of ivory.
“You are so lovely,” he said. “Perfect, beautiful. I feel your living aura as soft as down over your whiteness.”
He gripped her, longing to feel her flesh yield. He half wanted to bruise her and half did not. He wanted to have her living; he needed to have her breathing beside him in his bedchamber.
