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.oOo. PART I .oOo.
The sun beats down in a rhythm familiar to Miranda as she walks with the procession on the hill to the temple. The wide, rich green leaves being held above her protect her from most of the harsh glare, but not the heat that comes with the midday sun. As such, she has a light sheen of sweat that rests at her pale, pale hairline, trickling down the side of her neck intermittently. She wishes to be back in her home, bathed and chipping away at her newest creation. The noise here in the city centre, the attention on her, she is not suited to it, but it remains a necessity, she supposes.
They finally arrive at the steps of the temple and there, stood at twelve feet tall is her statue of the goddess Aphrodite, smiling coyly down at her followers, hands open and welcoming. This, her greatest work to date, is why she is being honoured today. Why there are scores of people lined in and around the temple on such a sweltering day and not in the pools or at the beach. She is honoured and mortified in equal measure, though she only allows the former to be expressed. The King himself thanks her, eyes lingering, then addresses the crowds.
“This day you honour us, Miranda of High House Priestly, with an offering and gift to our Goddess Aphrodite.” The crowds cheer and throw flower petals and grains at the announcement. She sees a number of men who fancy themselves her suitors and refrains, only barely, from rolling her eyes at them. The King, her cousin through marriage, continues, “May Aphrodite herself smile upon you hereafter,” and again, the crowd cheers uproariously. She is invited to enter the temple and to leave another offering for Aphrodite which she accepts.
She takes slow, reverent steps towards her creation and at the foot of the statue, she rests the most used chisel she used to sculpt the goddess in offering. As she descends to her knees, hands on the stone alter, she prays for a love that will fortify her and for the ability to keep it. She feels a strong breeze flutter against her forelock of white hair and wonders if the goddess herself has not answered her. “In your name, Aphrodite, I worship,” she whispers, rising to her feet.
There is a great feast that follows the unveiling of the temple’s statue and, loathe as she is to spend more time away from her work, Miranda cedes to attending if only for an hour. It’s a mistake the moment she arrives when she notices her ‘suitors’ lined up ready to talk to her. Not even the olives and figs that she loves most can make the bile taste in her mouth desist. She hates crowds like this, all looking to her, wanting to talk to her. She just ignores them, but it’s hardly ever enough to dissuade their efforts.
“Miranda, simply exquisite work,” a handsome face says to her. She smiles barely and nods vaguely, sipping wine and wishing she were at home. “The details were tremendous,” the face continues to say, trying desperately to make it seem like he has any knowledge of sculpting at all. She nods again.
“Won’t you get me more wine, good friend?” she asks innocently. He nearly trips over himself to do just that, unaware entirely of her making a hasty retreat to where the king sits with his wife. “Cousin, my king,” she says, nodding to Nadia, who adores her and her husband, who adores her for less innocent reasons. “I have several projects to tend to at my home, if I may be excused,” she says as humbly as she can. Her cousin, older than her by five summers, looks at her knowingly before turning to her husband and nodding.
“Of course,” the king says. “You have our gratitude again, Miranda,” he adds. She nods and bows again before retreating to her chariot.
“Home,” she says as she embarks the vehicle, sighing into the seat below her. She thinks, all the way home, about the tall prism of marble that awaits her. She has grand plans, grand plans indeed for that marble, and nothing makes her as fidgety as anticipating a new project. She wants nothing more than to be home and selecting her tools and beginning to shape her newest creation. Well, she sighs, she does want something more than that, but a love to sustain her seems to be down to the gods’ whims.
“There’s more certainty in sculpting,” she laments.
Far above Miranda, on a plush cushion of golds and greens, reclining and eating grapes, sits an inquisitive Aphrodite and an irate Eros.
“Congratulations on another statue, mother,” Eros says insincerely, young, angular face blushing from rage. Aphrodite hums noncommittedly, reaching for another grape.
“She is terribly lonely,” Aphrodite mumbles to herself, “terribly beautiful…”
“Oh yes, poor sculptor girl with the scores of suitors and a king vying for her attention!”
But Aphrodite is too busy thinking about how to reward the mortal for her beautiful sculpture to hear Eros’ tone. She turns her head to her son, who is fluttering his wings in time with his anger. She smiles at him, her temperamental boy, and proposes a wager of sorts.
“Wager? What sort of wager,” Eros says, suspicious. He eyes Aphrodite, who is still reclined and effortlessly beautiful. At different angles her appearance changes, eyes becoming narrower or wider, darker or lighter, her hair curling and coiling and straightening, her skin sliding anywhere between darker than night and lighter than the palest sands. As she stands, her stature changes from tall to short, curvaceous to fat to slender, her thighs dimpling as she walks, her biceps bulging as she sticks out her hand. Eros wonders if it’s difficult for her to appear so differently all the time, all the different beauties she has to represent without herself.
“I wager that I can give her a love to sustain her before you can,” the goddess says. Eros balks at her. Her?! The goddess of beauty can make someone fall in love faster than he? Eros, the (admittedly lesser) god of love and sex? Pah!
“You may try,” he says with a confident grin and eager flitter of his wings. “I accept!” He already has a long line of names to send to woo Miranda the Sculptor. She will not last a week!
Aphrodite laughs as she sees him plotting already, waving him off to do as he will. She loves her son, wishes him luck, but deep down she knows she has the advantage. For Eros is a god, but after that, he too is just a man, and what man knows a woman better than another woman? She looks back to Miranda, who is home and smiling at a block of marble, adoration in her eyes.
And slowly, her idea forms.
.oOo. PART II .oOo.
Miranda, ensconced in her mind and work, doesn’t care to note the passage of time or how many days she has only slept, eaten and sculpted. She can see the end product as vividly as she can her own face in the bathing water’s reflection. When she stops to eat, bullied into it by her maid, she sees lips and blushed cheeks in the centres of the figs, and in the honey, she sees bright irises. She is met with inspiration for her statue in every corner of life and thrives on the motivation.
She is pulled away from her work, now becoming more and more detailed as she shapes her marble, only by the several men that ask to meet with her. After the third one, another handsome face that looks at her with vacuous, greedy eyes, she tells Emilia, her favourite maid, to send them away with the excuse that she is working. She only ever hears the ruckus of Emilia greeting the self-concerned men then sending them elsewhere, an echo of satisfaction in the shutting of the front door.
One of the house-calls she cannot ignore is made by the king himself, who had not sent word of his visit from the island’s capital. She washes her hands when Emilia tells her to and dresses in robes that flatter her more than her working ones can. She has her hair tamed and styled to how she likes it and meets the king in her open dining room. He is dressed well, robes flattering and light, hair neat and crown firmly affixed to his head. She loathes him, and his slimy gaze.
“My king, how you honour me,” she says bowing respectfully.
“Leave us,” he says to the maids and guards, of which Miranda counts four. They flee the room and leave her with a king who is married and as subtle about his attraction to her as a nose on a face. “Miranda, I have come with a… unusual request.”
“It is my honour to hear you, your majesty,” she lies through her teeth. He smiles in what she’s sure he thinks is a handsome way. It makes her skin crawl.
“Nadia tells me of her wish for a child,” he begins. Miranda stills, knowing that Nadia cannot bear children due to an infection from her childhood. The king has two children already, though, left to him from his first wife who died in childbirth with their second son. “She wishes to raise her own child, one of her blood.” Miranda barely holds back the scoff. Nadia loves the king’s children like her own and would never insist on another.
“I don’t follow, majesty,” she says feigning ignorance to what it is he is suggesting.
“Surely you know that I love you, Miranda? That I wish to take you as my wife?” Her eyes widen, not so much by the obvious revelation but by the open nature of the admission.
“You are married to my cousin, majesty.” He steps closer to her, prompting her to take a step away. He halts, thank the gods.
“If you will bear us a child, you will be able to live with us in the palace. I will be able to see you, we will be able to be together, as I desire. Do you desire that, too, Miranda?”
She takes a moment, as if she’s thinking about it, all too aware that offending this man could mean death for her and a difficult life for her cousin. “I am sorry, majesty. I do not desire that.” His face falls but she feels no remorse for him.
“I see. I have been foolish to come here. Forgive my intrusion,” he says.
“We must venture to gain, or we gain nothing at all. I hold no hard feelings toward you, majesty.”
“You are most gracious, Miranda. I’m sure you have a sculpture to be returning to. I will take my leave,” he says, nodding to her, watching as she bows back and then turning and walking out of her vast dining room.
“Are you alright, Miranda?”
“Quite fine, Emilia. I think I’ll have grapes today rather than figs. The red ones, if you will,” she says as she walks back to her sculpting room in a daze. By the time she gets to her workshop, her heart and mind has already forgotten about the king, too devoted to her current work. She will need a name once she finishes the face, but thankfully she has time to think. It will have to be a perfect name, for her most perfect project yet.
“What is her problem!?” Eros bemoans. “I’ve answered the prayers of five men and a king and still, when royalty calls upon her, she is unmoved?”
The lithe form flutters angrily about his home on Olympus. He is so foolish for thinking such an impossible woman would ever listen to the reasonings of love and pleasure. How dare she, at that? How dare this little mortal, skilled as she may be in sculpting, defy his influence? How dare she turn away every suitor he’d sent just for her? Well, he thought darkly, if she was so insistent on being alone, then she could well be alone.
“I hereby condemn Miranda of High House Priestly to never finding a mortal to love!”
The sudden and furious charge of lightning from the topmost point of Olympus to the clouds above and below fill him with a righteous satisfaction. Miranda would only ever have her sculptures now, and loneliness would be her longest companion. Eros is too distracted to recall his bet with Aphrodite, but up in her wing of the palace, where the main deities cohabit, sits the goddess of beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation.
Aphrodite watches as the bolts of lightning light up the skies around Olympus, hears the curse that Eros subjects Miranda to, and laughs at her foolish boy. He’s so young that he hasn’t quite thought to watch his phrasing with things like curses. She will have to teach him how to do all that, just after she teaches him how to make a true match for mortals. She will use Miranda as her example.
“Was that Eros?” Hera asks her, eyeing the lightning still blasting furiously outside the large window.
“Yes,” Aphrodite says, plucking another fat grape, her favourite, and eating it with relish.
“He’s not making a fool of us all, is he?”
“No, dear,” Aphrodite answers. “I’ve got it all under control.”
“Well, if you say so. Have you seen Zeus anywhere?”
Aphrodite had seen him, yes, trying to woo another sprite.
“The northern forest,” she said, not tearing her eyes away from the lightning. “And Hera? I’d be swift if I were you, or another demigod might be on our hands.”
“I’ll kill him, king of Olympus or no,” she hears as Hera marches away.
.oOo. PART III .oOo.
Miranda’s single respite from sculpting comes in the form of reading poems. She only indulges this in the late hours, when her candle burns and offers only enough light to hear of heart-wrenching anxiety and the love that comes with it. Miranda wonders if love for her will be the way her dearest poet writes of it: as the singularly most moving feeling, with the power to crush and maim. Miranda wonders if she wants that, but knows the answer is yes.
She knows because when she glances at the steadily forming silhouette of a woman from marble, she feels yearning like nothing she’s ever felt seize her. In those moments, all she may do is put down her chisel and hammer and beg her heart to slow, her hands to still and her breath to steady. She can only look up like a child to the stars at the vague outline of a face that looks proudly forward. It must be the same, Miranda thinks as she reads of the desperation of love that this poet writes about.
“What about you, dearest?” she says to her sculpture one day. She has not yet settled on a name, but she knows it must be something strong, for the set of shoulders she pictures, and the strength of her jaw. “What do you think of love?” She stares for long minutes, willing her darling to answer back but she never does. And so she chips away and tells her innermost thoughts to her creation.
“I think it doesn’t have to be so hurtful as that poet writes,” she says, smoothing and wetting the stone to take the shape she wants. “I think it doesn’t have to be selfish or anxious. Surely it must be peaceful? To love and be loved? I suppose I wouldn’t know much about it,” she peters off. She feels her heart thumping dreadfully against her ribs. “I wish everyone would leave me alone, let me sculpt… I hope I never finish you, dearest.”
The idea of saying farewell to the woman before her, stone or not, brings tears to her eyes. She turns from her darling and washes her hands, drying them then eating a slice of fig. “Why do you do this to me?” she asks the stone woman who does not breathe and will not answer. It makes her cry all the more to know it, so she focusses on chewing and swallowing. When she can bear to look at the vague woman again she continues.
She works late into the night, then is shooed to bed and wakes early to work again, forced to eat a morning meal and then again at day’s break. She continues like that, grateful to Emilia for ensuring she doesn’t starve, and faced everyday with the steady progress of her statue. Her darling’s hair is nearly done, but there is a face now, one that smiles widely and sincerely down at her from the elevated working station. Miranda has to take several hours to break after she finishes the face.
“There you are, dearest,” she whispers reverently. She sits for long hours, talking to the face of her love and thinking of names, many of which she flicks away with annoyance and grace. They are too… soft for the strong face and stronger joy that her creation boasts. She needs a name with gravity, one that encompasses the power of femininity… “You’re not a man… but you have the same strength,” she says slowly, considering, then laughs delightedly a moment later.
“Hello, Andréa,” she says adoringly, pleased with such a perfect name. “How you bless me with your company!”
Renewed with a vigour, she works tirelessly to Emilia’s exasperation, hardly stopping to eat or sleep. She makes record time with the details of Andréa, working on her hair, letting it flow like ambrosia down her back. She makes her shoulders broad, her hips the same with a gentle curve at the waist, gentle curves at her breasts, strong impressions of her thighs down passed her knees to the graceful protrusion of ankle bone and level feet. She’s exquisite once sculpted, and Miranda takes a whole day to dote over her, cooing quietly.
“You’re lovely, darling, but so pale,” she says as she unpacks her paints. “I need to give you some colour. I can only imagine how glorious you’ll be once there is life in your face…”
“My lady, it’s far too late to begin that,” Emilia chides from the archway to the workshop Miranda works in.
“But I-”
“-Will be able to begin tomorrow. For now you must rest,” Emilia interrupts firmly. Miranda looks up to Andréa’s face and Emilia sends a prayer to the gods and goddesses to spare her mistress the heartache of loneliness she sees in her.
“Will you bring a cot to me, Emilia?” Miranda asks, a pale hand held steady to the statue’s ankle. Emilia, in her older age and after looking after Miranda for nearly her whole life, can see that it would be far too cruel of her to separate her mistress from her creation.
“I will,” Emilia concedes, “But you must sleep in it, and you will not wake even a moment before the sun. Swear to me, Miranda,” Emilia says, holding up a finger to communicate her seriousness.
“I swear it,” she says with relieved joy, her thumb stroking the stone ankle without her noticing. She makes haste to go to sleep once Emilia brings her a cot. She positions it just so, so she may gaze upon Andréa as she falls to Hypnos, and may see her dearest the moment she wakes. With that reassurance, she dozes off.
There’s nothing her maid can do or say to dissuade Miranda from beginning the painting portion of her creation. She wakes, she eats a slice of fig and two grapes, and begins mixing paints, beginning at Andréa’s feet and working her way up. Though they are high quality, as is everything in her home, Miranda still must wait for hours for paint to dry, even if she desperately wants to continue.
“Did you know that I have had your face in my mind’s eye since you were just a block of marble, Andréa? I loved you even then,” she says as she details the flimsy, sinuous sheet covering Andréa’s lower modesty. It makes Miranda blush to be touching Andréa there, but needs must, she reassures herself. “I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable,” she says looking up to the smiling face gazing down at her. “I promise not to linger.” She progresses to the olive branch in Andréa’s hand as quickly as possible.
When she makes it to jutting collarbones several long days later, Miranda realises her darling is nearly finished, and startles herself with her own heartache enough to not work on Andréa for two whole days. In that time she reads and, in the privacy the night offers her, she cries into her pillows, wishing that she might keep Andréa forever. She has the terrible feeling that once her darling is complete, she will leave and never see need for Miranda again. Her job will be done.
She cries on the second night away from Andréa for that reason, which makes her angry with herself. Why couldn’t she just say yes to one of the men that showed up at her door? The same men who never come around anymore to bore and distract her. Even if she were bored with someone, surely it would be better than being so crushingly lonely? But, she always argues, what about Andréa? No man would let her love Andréa as she does if she were to marry one of them. And it’s always that thought that settles her, that validates her love in her own eyes. If she is never permitted to be loved by someone else, she must be permitted to love Andréa. Anything else is unthinkable.
It’s the next day that she returns to Andréa, walking into her workshop remorsefully. “I’m sorry I was away so long,” she says, and perhaps she’s finally gone mad, but the smile she carved seems dimmer than usual. “I promise I won’t go away again, but you must promise the same, alright?” She comforts herself in the silence that follows with the thought that if Andréa could speak, she’d answer with, “I promise, Miranda”.
She paints slowly, then, savouring the tendons in Andréa’s neck and the contour of her jaw and the sharp height of her cheekbone. She holds a slice of fig in her hand when she paints Andréa’s mouth, wanting the youthful pink recreated in one of her favourites of Andréa’s features. She spends an unusual amount of time on Andréa’s eyes as well. Emilia, Miranda can tell, is bewildered by the order to bring a clear jar of honey to her, but it’s that honey jar that she holds up to the sunlight to see what colour Andréa’s eyes will be.
“You will be the sweetest woman in all of Greece,” Miranda murmurs to her, strokes careful and deliberate as she details a dilated pupil. “My sweetness,” she hums. She paints as slowly as she can stand to, but all too soon she has completed Andréa’s face, too. She steps back, down off her step ladder and to the far window where she watches Andréa for long, long moments. She wills her to look up at her, wills Andréa to turn her neck and catch her staring. She lets her shoulders drop and moves to pack her paints, leaving the dirtied pallets for Emilia and the other maids to clean and putting away the paints herself. She says nothing to Andréa as she does this, and the silence tastes like bile.
Just as she is about to exit her workshop, she turns to Andréa, who is still staring down at the single point on the floor before her. She opens her mouth, to say what she isn’t sure… “Goodbye” would make her cry, and anything else has already been said. She walks away saying nothing, only stopping Emilia and telling her to have Andréa moved from the workshop to the east room, which she keeps empty.
“Have it set up with a place to sit, and a table for meals… Make it somewhere you might reside,” she says absently. Emilia nods and Miranda misses completely the pity in the pale green eyes.
“I’ll make her comfortable,” Emilia promises, and Miranda thanks the gods and goddesses that she has Emilia.
Aphrodite observes with a frown on her ever-changing brow. She watches as Miranda spends the weeks after Andréa’s (such a well-suited name) completion trying to force herself to love a woman named Stephanie. She did not foresee Miranda spiralling like this, trying desperately to love someone living then returning to her home to the misery of being apart from the one she truly wants. Miranda leaves Andréa in that east room, entrusting her maids to upkeeping the room, with strict orders never to touch Andréa. But she never visits Andréa herself, and only reads poems of heartache.
Were it anyone else, Aphrodite might think it pitiful, but before her is a woman that will love once and deeply, and she’s cursed herself with the desire for her own statue. Miranda does not pray for love either, which is unusual, in Aphrodite’s experience. Typically, when mortals yearn for someone as fiercely as Miranda is, they pray to all the deities they can name for the attentions of the person they want. Miranda prays, but she prays to Demeter and to Persephone and to Hera and Athena. She prays to most but Aphrodite, as though shamed by her love for Andréa.
Between Miranda and Sappho, Aphrodite really has her work cut out for her.
.oOo. PART IV .oOo.
There was nothing more miserable to Miranda than being away from Andréa. She had tried most ardently to forget the honey eyes and fig mouth of her darling, but in every movement of Stephanie, Miranda would wonder if Andréa would move similarly. So plagued by the picture of her statue, Miranda had to bid Stephanie farewell, to the blonde’s confusion.
“Have I done something to offend, Miranda?”
“I’m afraid it is I who has offended. I wish you luck and farewell, Stephanie,” she had said. She was unwilling to let Stephanie think they might fall in love with one another when Miranda was forever lingering on the love she had for Andréa. She was meant to stay with Stephanie in the west of Cyprus for another fortnight, but she could no longer bear to be so far from her darling. The whole chariot ride back to her home in the east she wondered if Andréa had missed her as much as she had missed Andréa? Did Andréa’s stone lungs and heart ache, too?
Emilia tells her that Andréa’s room has been decorated completely and will be maintained as if a guest was living there.
“A guest is living there,” Miranda said, walking in the direction of the east room. She barely hears the “yes, Miranda,” that Emilia responds with. When she gets to the door to the east room that Andréa resides in, Miranda pauses. She’s a brilliant sculptor, she knows, and she’s very beautiful and very wealthy, too. She’s also very in love, and though she can pretend to be at ease in a crowd, she’s not strong enough. Strong enough, that is, to see Andréa’s face, her smile that she made with every tap of her hammer in time with her heart. Their tempo.
So, Miranda turns and retreats to her own rooms. She bathes in the petal scented water the maids left for her and only when the water is cold and her fingers are wrinkly like dates does she drag herself to her bed. She lays there for hours, feeling the sun move across the room and settle into the horizon through her window. She hopes the ache will stop if she lays still enough, or if she begins another project? The idea of moving on from Andréa settles in her chest and squeezes her ribs to the point of agony.
“Miranda,” Emilia calls from behind the bedroom door.
“Come in,” she gasps. Emilia brings her soup and bread for a simple dinner. She’s not bothered by it considering she arrived home two full weeks early.
“Miranda,” Emilia begins hesitantly. Miranda looks up from her meal.
“What is it, Emilia?”
“You have honoured the goddess Aphrodite with a statue in her temple, on her island of birth,” Emilia begins. Miranda can tell her maid is nervous, because she’s telling her things she already knows. “I’m sure if you ask Goddess Aphrodite for a blessing she would consider it,” Emilia finishes quickly. Miranda turns wearily to Emilia to see the older woman who cares for her so well.
“Emilia, I want you and the others to arrange for a chariot tonight to go to the beach home to the north. Take some time there to relax. When you come back to me I shall be better,” she says, hoping it’s true as much as she’s willing it to be. Emilia looks ready to argue, but Miranda raises a hand and smiles slightly when Emilia nods, bows and leaves.
“Take care, mistress,” she says on her way out.
“You as well, Emilia.”
Miranda only thinks once Emilia’s gone on what she would even ask Aphrodite for, looking around at her luxurious surroundings and to her full bowl of food. She thinks of Andréa, and how she wishes most for love, no matter how frightening her experience so far has been with it. She eats absently, thinking of how to phrase her request when she prostrates herself to ask a favour of Aphrodite.
“I only wish for one thing,” she whispers, thinking of Andréa’s beautiful, beautiful face. “But I fear I cannot have her.”
Aphrodite, far, far above, sighs in relief when Emilia makes the suggestion to her mistress and prompts Miranda to consider asking her for a blessing. Aphrodite is all too willing to give a gift to the greatest sculptor alive, who has already honoured her. She’s allayed to know that Eros has forgotten all about their wager and is distracted with pairing up scandalous couples wherever he goes. She stands from her cushion, form shifting like silk to and fro, and makes her way to find Hypnos, who owes her a favour.
“What can I do for you, Goddess?” the wizened seeming man says, stroking his beard and blinking blearily at her from his mountain of pillows.
“I need you to send a dream to a specific mortal, Miranda of High House Priestly for me, Hypnos. It must be of her statue Andréa calling her to pray to me.”
He blinks once, slowly like a cat, and nods. “Consider it done,” he slurs tiredly around a yawn.
“Poor Eros,” she says on her way back to her rooms.
.oOo. PART V .oOo.
Miranda retires to bed early that night, plagued with insecurity about her hopeless love and her shame in asking for something so unusual from Aphrodite. She sleeps deeply and dreamlessly until she doesn’t. Her dream starts in her bedroom with the sun shining insistently on her face. She gets up from bed in the dreamscape and walks to the east rooms to check on Andréa. She isn’t there, which she knows is impossible since the maids wouldn’t dare to move her beloved. She panics in her dream anyway, moving frantically from room to room in her search.
She runs to the workshop where she breathes easier at the sight of Andréa on her worktable where she willed her into existence with love and devotion. Andréa is still as she always is, staring down at the floor and smiling with luminescence. But she watches as Andréa turns to her, smiling at the shock that is surely showing on Miranda’s face. “You’ve been gone so long,” Andréa’s voice says, “Won’t you come see me?”
Miranda sits up in her bed, looking to the dark windows and listens. She knows by the silence that she is alone in the large home. Emilia and the other maids will have left just after sunset, and no one else lives with her. She wonders what woke her when her dream comes flooding back to her in a mix match of sunlight and Andréa’s eyes and her voice that Miranda can no longer remember. “Won’t you come see me?” she knows is what it said.
She leaps from her bed and rushes halfway to her workshop when she realises Andréa would be in the east room still. She turns and heads there, not bothering to hesitate at the door this time and simply storming in, breathing deeply in relief when she sees her darling stood where she placed her by the window so she can feel the sun. She walks to her, tears in her eyes, and is weeping softly by the time she reaches the delicate wrist of her love.
“Oh Andréa,” she moans, looking up and stroking the perfect face bent towards her, “Forgive me,” she begs. Her vision is watery and wobbling as she touches all she can of the statue, reassuring herself that Andréa is there, that she’s real and not gone. “Oh, please,” she says, sinking to her knees and bowing in on herself, hands at Andréa’s ankles. “Please, Aphrodite,” she begs. “Please send me a woman in Andréa’s image to love.” She repeats it over and over until her knees ache and even then.
When she’s finally exhausted, she crawls to the cushioned seats and falls to sleep staring through her tears at Andréa. She wakes with a headache and hope. But when Andréa’s stony, smiling face meets her vision, she deflates. Every night after that she returns to Andréa to pray to Aphrodite, always keeping her calm even through the ever-present ache in her chest. When Emilia and the others return, tanned from the sun and relaxed, she informs them that dinner is to be served half a candle mark earlier than usual. The others don’t ask questions, but Emilia looks at her worriedly.
Miranda seems to fall in a hopeless routine thereafter. She wakes, goes for the walk Emilia forces her on, then eats and reads to Andréa until the midday meal, which she shares with Andréa, then into the afternoon until supper. She eats again then prays to Aphrodite, more and more desperate as the days pass. She sleeps on the cushions in the east room, wakes, then repeats.
“Miranda,” Emilia calls in the middle of a passage of poetry Miranda particularly likes, catching her attention. “You have a visitor from the west.”
“Who is it?”
“Lady Stephanie, mistress.” Miranda’s face tightens, her lips pursing in anxiety. She nods, glad that Emilia has made sure she dresses properly in the mornings.
“Send her in,” she says to which Emilia nods. And then there’s Stephanie, dressed lavishly, her long blonde hair done to impress. Miranda feels her gut sink, somehow knowing that Stephanie is not there to ask after her health then take her leave.
“Miranda,” she says with a winning smile. Miranda resists the urge to look to Andréa’s which she thinks is far nicer by comparison.
“Stephanie,” she greets without standing. Stephanie seems offended by this but says nothing. Miranda technically outranks the other woman being that her cousin is the queen consort. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I have come to ask you to reconsider,” Stephanie says. Emilia who stands by the door shakes her head. “I wish to marry you,” she finishes.
“I told you already, Stephanie that I did not wish to offend you, but you are putting me in a position where I must do that,” Miranda said.
“I know you don’t love me, but would a union between us be so bad?” Miranda dislikes how Stephanie is attempting to manipulate her, especially by how she paints a wounded expression on her face.
“A union not based on love would be so bad to me, yes,” Miranda says firmly. “You’re welcome to stay here to give your horses rest if you’d like, but I’ll not hear more of marriage between us.”
“So you’ll just yearn after your statue?” Stephanie says, gesturing belligerently to Andréa. “What sort of life will that be? Only a fool would surrender to a future like that!”
Miranda’s face builds in fury for only a moment, then cracks and expresses her deep sadness at the truth in the words. She is a fool, she knows, but she would not ever be able to love another but Andréa, and if she is to live a fool’s life that way, then so be it. Her face hardens, however, at Stephanie who only came to manipulate her into a marriage. Who would insult Andréa to her face, even if it is one of painted marble?
“I’m afraid the offer for you to stay is no longer open to you, Lady Paloukos. Good day. Emilia, see the Lady and her entourage to the door.”
“Yes, mistress,” Emilia says, ushering Stephanie out, who looks both sheepish and righteous.
Miranda knows Emilia will keep the other maids away from the east room for the rest of the day, so she sheds her brave face and turns to Andréa like a flower to the sun. “She’s right,” she says quietly, afraid to voice herself louder than the hushed whisper. “I am a fool,” she says, eyes watering hopelessly. “But I do love you, and I always will.” She touches first the olive branch in Andréa’s left hand, and then the wrist nearest to it. She lets her touch travel up to an elbow, then a broad shoulder and to cup the side of a slender neck.
“I created you from marble and love,” she says, hiccoughing on her choked sobs, “And I swear I will see out my days right here by your side,” she whispers. “My greatest, loneliest love.” She leans down, and as she hasn’t before, she kisses the forearm holding the olive branch. She peppers kisses for several moments until she notices the warming of the marble beneath her mouth. She pulls back, and looking up at Andréa’s face, she sees a lively blush that not even the best painter could capture. She sees the chest of marble begin to expand with breath and feels the exhale upon her face. Slowly, Andréa unravels from her marble prison and, like a blooming flower, she blushes all over as life is bled into her soft skin.
Andréa jolts as the last of the stiffness seems to leave her, and Miranda, in a state of shock, moves to steady her darling, unaware that Andréa is quite underdressed, only the artful sheet as a garment. When she feels the supple flesh give way as she grasps her, Miranda gasps and cries in disbelief, moving her hands everywhere she can, trying to memorise the feel of her through her steady tears. She can’t believe it, truly cannot believe it!
“Praise Aphrodite!” she exclaims when she looks into the honey eyes she painted so many months before. “What a blessing, what a blessing, what a blessing,” Miranda praises softly, her chant coated in wretched relief.
“A gift,” the gentle voice says to her. Andréa moves her arm up to offer Miranda what was once an olive branch but is now a myrtle flower. The little white blossom’s filaments seem to explode outward in brilliant displays, and somehow, Miranda feels the same. She only just manages to accept the flowers before her head’s being cradled and tilted up towards a soft, fig-pink mouth. It tastes as sweetly as the fruit that inspired it.
“My Andréa,” Miranda murmurs between dizzying kisses, “My darling, my love.”
“Miranda,” Andréa sighs. “My Miranda,” she says, smile blinding before kissing her again.
What a blessing, Miranda thinks. What a blessing.
“And that,” Aphrodite says to Eros as they watch the unlikely lovers kiss, “is how it’s done!” Eros scowls intensely, but is vaguely impressed with his mother for her thinking so non-conventionally. They both watch as Miranda shows her maid the gift the gods have bestowed by her, listening to how breathless she is.
“Praise Aphrodite,” Miranda says, “And praise Eros,” she adds, looking adoring to Andréa, who now looks just as adoringly back. Eros’ scowl lessens at that, wings fluttering, pleased.
“But I cursed her!”
Aphrodite pats him on his head and says, “Andréa is not mortal, Eros, and you cursed Miranda to never loving a mortal.” Her son harrumphs.
“Yes, I concede you did well, mother,” he says, puffing up his chest to appear manlier in his defeat.
“Say it,” Aphrodite sings. Eros rolls his eyes.
“Mother knows best,” he grumbles. Aphrodite cackles.
“Yes she does!”
“Yes, yes, gloat later,” he says, looking into the window she commands. “Go forward,” he urges. “I want to see what happens next.” She obliges him and waves a dark hand to show Andréa, tall and gentle next to a blushing Miranda as they stand under a myrtle tree and swear vows to love each other until their dying days. Aphrodite spies Eros wiping a tear from his eye as they exchange gifts and kiss softly, more tenderly than he’s seen mortal behave. But it’s when they skip forward to Miranda’s next sculpture, a beautiful, adolescent Eros to join his mother in the temple that he says, “I, uh, I have things to do,” and flits away. Aphrodite allows him to collect himself as she watches one of her greatest matches live their long lives together.
She sees through the years as Miranda sculpts and paints with Andréa by her side, her perfect miracle and as Andréa sits with Miranda, writing poetry with the knowledge from all the poetry Miranda had read to her when she was a statue. She sees them live out happy lives, and by the time Miranda passes away, only a few moments before Andréa does, the mortal confirms that love is peace, and on her last breath she thanks Aphrodite for her greatest, most joyous love: Andréa.
“Not bad, Aphrodite,” she says, sipping ambrosia, pleased with herself. “Not bad at all.”
END