Nectar of the Gods

A short story

[Note: This story previously appeared in The Asylum and Passage Prize Vol. 1. It is republished here in full.]

###

Madeline’s Culmination Ceremony was scheduled for Monday, December 15, 2091, which didn’t leave her much time.

All the arrangements had been made. The paperwork was signed. Her few remaining effects were neatly packed into two small plastic storage containers. She’d been mildly looking forward to the date with relief—until yesterday.

Now it loomed like a bottomless abyss. 

The Culmination team didn’t work on weekends, so she was already getting an extra day for free. There was no getting out of it. She’d agreed to the rules when they admitted her. Adam even showed her the forms she’d signed. He’d projected them onto the wall of her room that morning and zoomed in on the fine print, circled it with his finger, double tapped to zoom. 

“See? Right here in black and white. Culmination is required on the resident’s 90th birthday. Your birthday is tomorrow. Happy early birthday, Madeline!” 

Age 90 was the standard legal cut off at almost all the Facilities for women, anyway. She’d even voted for the law years ago when it was on the ballot. “A good idea for everyone,” they’d been calling it. There had been a commercial for the law that had smiling old people chanting “Ninety is plenty!” She remembered agreeing with them.

And now time was up.

She’d have to escape today.

Before it got too dark to see it. 

“Thank you, Adam.” 

“Would you like to hear a new joke?” 

“Not now, Adam.” 

There was a long waiting list of women willing to sign the agreement to snag a coveted spot at the Facility. Women without families. Rich old ladies. The fewer your connections, the better your chances. Bribes also helped. Some days they’d joke about the husbands they didn’t miss, the children they’d chosen not to have, over and over. It was better that way—who’d have wanted to see what hags they’d become? Madeline could see the looks on the young children’s faces when they came to sing at Winter Holiday time. Fear, disgust.

She always wondered which of the little girls would get her room one day. 

Most of her Facility friends had died naturally. No Culminations necessary. Harper, stroke. Devin, Alzheimer’s, choked to death on her nutrition shake. Emma, Covid-89. Ashleigh, sepsis in both legs, died from post-amputation complications. 

“The poor dear. Yours will be painless,” Adam would say when she asked him about how they died. Adam served as Next of Kin for some of them. He would be Madeline’s Next of Kin on Monday. 

Madeline’s roommate Ava had died last week, gasping for breath from double pneumonia, calling out the same name over and over. Harrison! Harrison!

The next morning, she asked Adam who Harrison was. 

“A Bengal cat.” 

Madeline sometimes wondered why she’d lasted this long, mentally as sharp as a task and healthy as a clam, as Doctor Rappanganni liked to say. His English seemed to deteriorate at each visit. 

But then yesterday she’d seen something on the news and now she couldn’t sleep, could barely eat. At dinner time, the dining room screens played vintage TV shows like Sex and the City and Friends, but at lunchtime they showed a curated selection of feel-good news clips. Nothing controversial, nothing stressful, no politics. The news clip she saw announced that a famous billionaire, one who’d revolutionized the art market years ago, had bequeathed his entire collection to the city upon his death.

Fever burned in her chest. She’d crawl if she had to. 

###

Madeline asked Adam to help her to the bathroom. Her fine motor skills, gripping, pinching, had deteriorated in the last year. Arthritis. She was forced to stare at the mirror over the sink as Adam pulled down her Lululemon adaptive joggers and her SKIMS Adult Diapers and lowered her onto the toilet. Shriveled flesh, pale skin like crumpled tissue paper, jutting hip bones. Her face finally matched her body; she’d given up on filler and Botox and peels in her seventies. What was the point? Like frosting a rotten cake. 

“I’m done.” 

Adam whirred and bent at his waist to help her stand. His cold titanium fingers slid gently between her skin and the waistband of her pants and tugged them back up. A robotic nurse that helped her urinate and defecate was the only thing that ever touched her. No human man had touched her body, in a non-clinical sense, since a shameful one-night stand when she was 65. Girls’ trip to the Bahamas. Six Cadillac margaritas followed by one bald lawyer from Charlotte with a sunburn and a wedding ring. The last sex.

She was grateful she couldn’t remember too much of it. 

She wondered sometimes if her old dating profiles had ever been taken down, if the apps still existed. She didn’t remember deleting any of her accounts. Did they still haunt the cloud? Decades-old artifacts containing her last flattering photos, her trending interests, her likes and dislikes. Lonely digital time capsule, seeking same. Graphic designer. Artist. Collector of good vibes and good times. Dog mom.

She found a husband on one of them. The marriage lasted seven years, until she turned 49. No kids. Too late for that. Graham had grown children from his first marriage and zero interest in impregnating her. She’d agreed—no kids. She knew it going in. She had no excuse.

She found out she was pregnant right after they got home a trip to St. Lucia for her 43^rd birthday. She waited too long to tell him, then miscarried at thirteen weeks. When he came home that day, he found her sobbing on the floor of the bathroom.

He wasn’t even mad. “Well, guess I dodged that bullet.”

After the divorce, she focused on work. She’d done well. Made it. Graham left her a comfortable sum from his estate when he died, which paid for the Facility. Her recollection of the years after him was ephemeral, a faded collection of moments and people since forgotten. Her memories crumbled to powder whenever she tried sifting through them for something solid to cling on to.

Except for one.

“Thank you, Adam.” 

“You’re very welcome! Would you like to take your nap now?” 

Madeline shuffled out of the bathroom over to the tiny closet that held the stacked boxes of her remaining belongings. She struggled to pry the lid off one. 

“Those are your donations, Madeline.” 

“They’re still my things. At least for one more day.” 

“More than that! You have approximately 37 hours left.” She pulled a soft brown coat out of the box using both her gnarled hands. 

Adam smiled. “Are you feeling cold? It’s a pleasant 71 degrees in your room.”

“I’m going for a walk. Outside.” 

Adam’s smile vanished. “Oh, that’s not a good idea. It’s cold outside.” 

“Which is exactly why I need a coat.” Adam frowned and shook his finger like a schoolteacher. “Residents are not allowed to leave the Facility except for authorized field trips. I can show you the rulebook where it states—

“Yes, I know,” she said. “But I need to go see something before they put me down.” She’d had to put four dogs down over the years. Soon it would be her turn. Would she call out for them at the end? Domino! Brutus! Gigi! Cleopatra!

“See what?” 

“You’ll see.”

Adam nodded thoughtfully. “Sometimes residents ask to see special places one last time before Culmination. I show them images of those places, and they feel better. What can I show you?” 

“I have to see it in person, Adam. It won’t take long. Can you help me with the coat?” He whirred over to her, took the coat from her and held it open. She pushed her frail arms through the openings and felt the familiar weight. Cashmere and wool, Bergdorf Goodman, a Christmas gift to herself on her 70th. It still smelled like the Baccarat Rouge she’d worn then. Fragrances were forbidden in the Facility.

She’d requested the Aromatherapy Add-On for her Culmination so the room would smell nice while she drank her Culmination Cosmo, as the ladies all called their death cocktail. It would be the worst hangover of your life and it would last forever. Doctor Rappanganni joked that the cocktail tasted like the “nectar of the Gods. Quite delicious, they tell me! You’ll feel no pain, dear.” 

Madeline pushed her feet into the worn pink rubber Facility-issued slides. The only footwear allowed. Then, her crabbed fingers dug into the dirt around the large plant in the corner and emerged clutching an orange prescription bottle. 

“That’s a funny place to keep your pills,” said Adam.

“Please open this for me.” 

“It’s not time for your pills.” 

“These are not my pills.” 

“Oh.” Adam gently took the bottle from her and opened it gracefully, his beautiful shiny fingers working their magic. She held out her palm and he tipped the contents of the bottle into it. Two large emeralds glittered under the fluorescent light.

“Very nice. Colombian emerald, perfect clarity. Estimate at auction…one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, my goodness!” 

“Gift from my ex-husband.” She slid her hand into her coat pocket and let the earrings drop. “I thought I’d give them to…which nurse is on duty today? Claudia?”

“Clowdia, yes.” He pronounced it with Claudia’s preferred pronunciation. Claudia had corrected the residents many times. “How kind. Many ladies give gifts to their favorite nurses before Culminations.” 

Madeline shuffled right past the nurse’s station. Adam followed her, pushing an empty wheelchair, for her safety. She made it to the end of the corridor to the steel emergency exit. It was naptime, so none of the other residents were around. On weekends the nurses gave everybody a double serving of “nap juice,” since they were usually short staffed. She had pretended to drink hers, then spit it into her pillowcase. 

She’d timed it perfectly. “Please call Clowdia, Adam.” He nodded and blinked. “Tell her it’s urgent.” 

She peered through the small glass window in the door. It was snowing. Her feet would freeze, but she wouldn’t need feet after Monday. 

Claudia, squat and round in her pink scrubs, hustled over to them. “Hey! Joo not supposed to be here. Adam, take her back to her room.” 

“Clowdia, Madeline has a special gift she’d like to give you. It’s from Colombia.” 

Claudia’s thick black eyeliner made her tiny eyes appear even smaller. She reminded Madeline of the glistening brown hippos she’d once seen on safari. 

“Hello, Claudia.” 

“My name is Clowdia.”

Madeline cupped the earrings in her palm and pulled them out of her pocket. Claudia’s eyes widened when she saw them. “These will go with the ring you stole.” Claudia nostrils flared.

 “I no take nothing from your room!” 

“Adam, you have the video, right?” 

He had access to all the security videos in the Facility. She’d asked him to show her the footage taken the day she’d found the small shoebox in her bedside table ajar. Claudia hadn’t even bothered to put the lid back on properly. 

“Oh yes. Timestamped January 2, 11:55 am. While you were finishing lunch.”

Claudia trembled. “I deent do it.” 

“The Facility’s facial recognition software is never wrong, Clowdia.” 

Claudia’s mouth fell open. Madeline laughed. “Oh, relax. Your job is safe. Now, you can have the earrings if you just let me take a very short walk right down the street. It won’t take long.” 

“I…can’t let you do dat.” 

“Tell her what they’re worth, Adam.” 

“The estimate at auction is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” 

Claudia’s small eyes struggled to absorb this information. 

“Open the door and I’ll tell Adam not to email the security videos to anyone at Blackrock Residential Holdings. And of course, we won’t tell anyone. Will we, Adam?” 

Claudia seemed to shrink even more, her head sinking into her short neck as she stared at Adam. “You can delete the files, yes?” 

Adam smiled brightly. “Since the videos have been tagged as evidence in a theft, it would be illegal for me to delete the files. But according to the rules, if Madeline declines to press charges, all pertinent videos will auto-delete upon her death in exactly 36 hours and 41 minutes.” 

Urgency burned Madeline’s chest like a fire. The fever started to spread under her coat. 

“Open the door, Claudia.” 

Claudia didn’t bother to correct Madeline this time. They waited as she fumbled with her key cards. A random fragment of poetry floated into her brain as she watched Claudia slide the key card into the door as she glared at her.

So much depends upon

a four-foot-ten El Salvadoran in pink scrubs.

###

New York City, 2023

For eight weeks, three hours each Wednesday evening, the Intro to Figurative Sculpture students scooped and pressed clay at their stations, arranged in a circle in front of a raised platform where a live model sprawled. The model looked like she was at least 45 and had dramatic stretch marks on her ample belly and squirrel pelts in her pits and her nether regions and a Harpo Marx hairdo, and she smelled like the subway. 

Maddie sculpted what she saw, smug in her own clean, firm body. Imagine being old and horrible looking, she thought with a shudder. She had no real interest in fine art, but she’d always enjoyed pottery, and this class fit her schedule and satisfied her last fine art requirement. 

Their original teacher had quit. Uterine cancer. Nicholas Peretti was the last-minute substitute.     According to the quick Google search Madeline did on the first day of class, he was a semi-famous artist who’d been featured in a New York Magazine “30 Under 30” profile and even had a small piece on display outside the Whitney. Madeline’s inchoate dreams of being a graphic designer seemed pathetic next to his masterful ability to coax sticky clay into the model’s thighs, tibiae, hip bones, clavicles, massive breasts, and overflowing belly.

A job is what she actually needed. Not another pointless art class for her pointless design degree. Her parents in Michigan were cutting her off next month. Her little brother was starting at Tulane. They had to come up with fifty grand a year for tuition, and that was with his tennis scholarship.

She’d thought about leaving New York, but she had a lovely apartment in the East Village. It had crown moldings, leafy trees outside that left dappled shadows on the kitchen walls in the afternoons, and overdue rent. Her two roommates, who she considered of extremely mediocre attractiveness, had quit their jobs in retail to spend all day on their laptops letting people watch them strip on live video chats. 

Her roommates tried to get her involved in their “woman-owned small business.” She almost said yes when they showed her their last bank statement: $12,000 in one month! It was so liberating, they declared. 

“Aren’t you a feminist?” Emily asked her accusingly. “This is what fucking female equity looks like, Maddie!” 

“Plus you owe us two months’ rent,” Lucy said. “You owe us, Maddie.” Total financial freedom and all you had to do was whatever the strangers masturbating on the other side of the computer told you, and maybe use some toys, and maybe let your roommates touch you, because you were all friends and everyone was bi these days, so it was fine. Just business. Just equity. 

“You’re the most conventionally beautiful of the three of us and that’s what some of these basic losers like,” Emily told her. “You could make fat stacks! We’ll do all the marketing and you can keep half of what we earn together, minus the rent plus utilities you owe.” Conventionally beautiful. What only basic losers like.

After she said no to their exciting job offer, she stayed away from the apartment as much as she could. She almost bought a ticket home, but she had to finish school. Imagine failing to get a degree a month before graduating. 

But maybe she’d already failed. New York had turned every girl she knew into an extremely liberated whore, except her.

“I can’t believe you won’t do it,” Emily said. “Didn’t know you were such a fucking prude, dude. You’ve got two weeks to find a new place.” 

Meanwhile, Intro to Figurative Sculpture was a disaster from the start. By the end of the second class, she sensed that some of the students were in love with Professor Peretti. She resolved to pay him no attention. 

“Like this,” he’d say to the androgynous girl sitting next to her and she’d watch him use his thumbs to coax wet clay along the sway of an inchoate clay figure’s back. Recognizable human shapes emerged wherever his fingers touched, like magic. 

By the last class, she’d learned one thing: she’d never be an artist. Her piece looked like a deformed Oompa Loompa in an Afro wig. 

She was in the back storage room sliding her finished piece onto the shelf behind the kiln when he approached her. Everyone had already left. She ignored him, untied her canvas apron, and slipped it onto a hook. 

“Your piece turned out nice. You really captured her, uh, essence.” He smiled. “And her hairdo.” She didn’t understand why she got so nervous around him. 

“That waste of clay is my first, and my last, attempt at sculpture.” 

“Madeline, right?” She washed her hands in the small sink.

“Professor Peretti, right?” 

He grinned. “Call me Nick. Listen, do you have any big plans next week?” 

She dried her hands and tried to think. Plans? He hadn’t said a word to her for eight weeks, except to address the whole class. One time she looked up from her slab and he was watching her. She looked away but she could feel his eyes like wet paint strokes on her face. 

“Well, I’m graduating in a couple weeks, so I’m pretty busy looking for a job right now.” She smelled cigarettes and turpentine on his clothes. 

“Well, I might have a job for you.” She stared at him. “I just got a big commission, 

something…unique, and I need a model. It shouldn’t take too long. If you’re interested, stop by my studio tomorrow and we’ll get started.” 

He handed her a card with an address. 21 Wooster Street, Apartment C.

“This city is full of models. I’m not a model.” He is looking for someone basic. Conventional. 

“May I?” He reached out and took her hand, lifting her arm into the air. He ran the back of his fingers up the inside of her upper arm. 

“Look at these. Excellent brachialis. Hard to find.” 

He explained that it would take a week and he’d pay her three thousand dollars.

“Will I have to be, you know, naked?” 

He laughed. “We artists say ‘nude.’ Sounds nicer, right? You’ll get a good looking-over and not everyone likes that.” He shrugged. “Think you can hold a pose?” Three thousand dollars.

“I don’t know. I can try.” 

“You’ll do fine. Wear your hair up, please.” 

###

She threw up outside 21 Wooster Street on the first day, in the gutter behind an Amazon delivery van, then wiped her mouth and rang the buzzer. She was trembling when she walked into his studio, so he took her into the tiny kitchen and poured her a shot of warm vodka. He showed her charcoal sketches of the pose he wanted. One arm held straight up and bent at the elbow so her fingertips just grazed the back of her neck. The other hanging down at her side. Head cocked so. One leg back, front foot pointed. Easy peasy.

He handed her a black silk robe with red Chinese characters on it and led her to the bathroom to change. 

Madeline imagined him attacking her, tying her up. You don’t go into a strange man’s apartment and take your clothes off! When she walked out of the bathroom, he directed her over to the rug in the middle of the loft. He turned on bright spotlights, lighting her in specific ways. 

The revolving fan blew the robe around her legs and she clutched it tight to her body. It smelled like an ashtray and faint B.O. Had he ever bothered to wash it? How many other models had worn it? She thought about leaving. Then she thought about three thousand dollars. All she had to do was take off her clothes for a stranger. She was no different from her roommates. She was a prude and a hypocrite. 

He put a record on his retro turntable and jazz music filled the space. She rolled her eyes. Okay, boomer. He couldn’t have been too much older than her. The “30 Under 30” thing hadn’t been that long ago. 

“Whenever you’re ready.” He sat on a raised stool, his hands on his thighs, watching her. There was a huge block of soft gray clay on the tall table in front of him. He wore a leather butcher’s apron over his jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. 

She didn’t move. Weak morning light coming through the windows painted faint rectangles on the floor. 

“Like this, remember?” He demonstrated the pose with his arms. She copied him, placing her feet in the same position she had seen, one arm over her head, one hanging down. 

“Good. The kimono, please.” 

Ah, a kimono. Japanese, not Chinese. At least her roommates didn’t have to see the faces of the men they stripped for. A bird slammed hard into the window and the glass reverberated. She jumped. The silk caught the breeze from the fan and billowed up, revealing her legs, as if the robe knew what to do better than she did. Like an old horse leading its rider back to the barn.

How many times had this same robe opened for him? She shrugged, letting the silk slide off her shoulders. Fake it ‘til you make it, like she’d heard on a TED talk. She felt the silk pool around her ankles. She couldn’t look down, not when she felt her nipples clench. 

“You okay?” Nope. She relaxed her body into the position and focused on breathing and not passing out.

“Yep.” 

“Perfect. Now just hold it there.” 

By the afternoon, she almost forgot she was naked with a man. She remembered when he said, “turn your body about an inch towards me, please. I need a better view of the breasts.” The shock of those words. The breasts. Her breasts were a the. 

Every day for five days she came to the cavernous loft and stood on a soft rug in front of him, her hair pinned up the way he liked it, listening to the same record. He gave her breaks when she needed one and she would sit on his kitchen stool in the black kimono and watch him press clay with his thumbs. 

“Who is it for? I mean, who commissioned this?” 

He wiped his hands on his jeans and rubbed his chin. “Young rich guy. He wants to commission work by new artists and sell them as NFTs. He’s a reactionary, thinks he’s going to bring back classical art. Good luck with that. But in the meantime, I’m happy to take his money.” 

“I wasn’t aware the ancient Greeks sold NFTs to each other.” He laughed.

“He wants to like, make beauty trendy or something. Bring back the old ways. I mean, same, but he’d get there a lot faster by drone-striking the art schools.” 

###

On the second-to-last day, he asked her to face the windows of his studio, her back to him. The music was loud and she didn’t hear him walk over and kneel behind her. She jumped a little when she felt his hand on the inside of her thigh. It was wet from the clay but warm. He put his other hand on the heel of her foot and pried it back an inch. His fingers pressed into her thigh as he adjusted her pose. Then his fingers relaxed and withdrew, brushing against her skin like feathers as he pulled them away. 

That night at home, when she got undressed, there were dried streaks of clay where he had touched her. She scrubbed to wash them off but could still feel his fingers. 

It was like a branding iron. 

By Friday, the job was done. Orange light from early June sunset streamed in his windows. She slipped into her robe and he waved her over to his worktable. The figure was two feet tall, wet, and gray. The legs were longer and leaner than hers, the body more streamlined. Is that how she looked to him? 

“Like I dipped you in paint, right?” 

After she got dressed, she found him waiting for her in the kitchen. 

“Have a seat.” She perched on a wobbly wooden stool in his tiny kitchen. He uncorked a bottle of champagne he dug out of the small kitchen fridge and poured it into two jelly jars. Gray wet clay fingerprints smeared the bottle. He wiped his hands on a wet towel hanging on a hook in the kitchen and fished a checkbook out of a drawer.

“Is a check okay? Or I can Venmo you.” 

“Check’s fine.” 

She took a sip of her wine and reached for the check. You know what they call women who get naked for money. At least she’d survive here a little longer. She slid the check into the pocket of her jeans. 

“Thank you.” She stretched her arms above her head. How sore you get, staying still, not moving for so long. Her hands felt her hair, secure in its bun. It felt unbearably tight. She yanked the bobby pins out and her hair fell around her shoulders. 

Nick cleared his throat. 

“Madeline.” His knuckles rested on the countertop. He rolled them back and forth like he was kneading dough. 

“Yeah?” 

“Do you have plans for dinner?” 

The needle reached the end of the last track on the record and skipped off. Silence filled the massive space. He hadn’t asked her to stay for dinner after the other sessions.

“Um. No.” 

He rubbed his chin and watched her. “Boyfriend?” 

Her throat was suddenly very dry. She shook her head. 

He glanced away and rubbed a spot of dried clay off his forearm. 

“Will you let me make you some food? You must be hungry after all your hard work.”

“I didn’t do much.” 

“Oh, yes you did.”

###

They ate spaghetti carbonara together and drank more wine and after that, neither of them left the loft for three sublime days. When she finally did go back downstairs to the street, she felt strange and giddy standing on the sidewalk, blinking in the bright sunshine, her skin buzzing under her clothes in alien ways. All she had to do was run back to her apartment, pack her clothes, and tell her roommates to go fuck themselves.

Which they were probably doing anyway. 

“Get back here as fast as you can,” Nick said from his doorway. 

It was her silk kimono now. No one else would ever wear it again. 

Her apartment was empty when she got there. She looked around in shock, like she was seeing it for the first time. She lived in this tiny dump? There was a huge pink dildo on the coffee table in the living room, next to a bong. 

She was on the landing with her clothes stuffed into a duffel bag and a backpack with her books and laptop when Emily texted her the link to the New York Times story. She stopped and read it right there: Scandal Hits NYU as Sexist, Racist Art Teacher is Exposed.

The fat live model with the squirrel pelts was accusing him of “inappropriate behavior” and “racial abuse.”

The reporter quoted an email from Nick to someone else complaining that she was “too overweight” and didn’t meet his “aesthetic standards.” Someone else claimed that he used his part-time teaching position to “exploit underrepresented women.” 

The model from class claimed to be part black and queer, so the ACLU, GLAAD, and the NAACP were prepping lawsuits against NYU and Professor Peretti. The Manhattan DA was getting involved. Students and parents were being contacted. The art school was considering banning the use of live models.

Can you believe this shit? 

What a fucking sleaze. 

Glad NYU’s cutting ties. 

Lucy and I are organizing a group to tear down a statue of his uptown, u want to come? She’s bringing edibles. 

###

Her wheelchair skidded and crunched over the cobblestones, past the entrance to Central Park West. Madeline wasn’t cold. She spotted the statue up the path, dark and gleaming in front of snow-covered boulders. Adam slowed the wheelchair down and they rolled through the snow, cutting tracks through powder. 

“Stop here, Adam.” 

The clay model had been found in a warehouse in Queens. The Park Arts Commission had won it at auction and produced it in bronze using the ancient method of lost-wax casting, according to the artist’s precise specifications. The life-size Peretti figure was unveiled this week to great fanfare. Now the whole world can enjoy this classically inspired piece, an echo of our glorious past, lost to us for decades.

The wheelchair jerked to a stop. The statue, its polished skin glossy and taut, rose in front of them. A few deflated balloons clung to the stark branches of the tree above it. Madeline’s eyes stung in the cold. Her leaky heart thudded. The old pose. Her gaze slid down the hard curve of the figure’s hips, the nip at its waist, her eyes tracing the path his fingers had pressed into the gray clay. 

She could hardly remember having such a body. Had she looked like this, really? Her youth made eternal, frozen in bronze for tourists to ogle and rainstorms to drench and snow to freeze and sun to heat, right in the middle of the park, gorgeous and wanton, forever. Had the flattened parabolas of deflated skin on her chest, the ones she avoided looking at when Adam helped her out of the shower and past the mirrors over the sink, really looked like that? 

There was a crescent of snow on each of Bronze Madeline’s perfectly round buttocks. Excellent brachialis visible in her shapely arms. Agony curled around her heart like a serpent. She should have burned her clothes and worn nothing but black silk kimonos with red Japanese characters.

An ancient feeling swept through her, like a whiff of fragrance preserved in the crinoline of an antique ball gown. She felt a thrilling stab of physical pleasure. Old muscles stirred. Sleepy nerve endings woke up. She could run across the park and never stop! They’d never catch her! You were right, Doctor. Rappanganni, I’m fit as a riddle, just like you said! 

As fast as it had hit her, the burst of energy fled. She closed her eyes and tried to escape back into it, but it was gone. 

Adam bent forward to Madeline’s ear. “Did you hear me?” 

“No, what did you say?” 

“I asked you what you like about it. Why did you want to see it?” 

“I can’t remember now, Adam.” Her voice scraped out of her dry throat. Why had she gone to all this trouble to see a piece of human-sized metal? Adam was mostly made of metal. At least he could speak and touch. The gleaming bronze figure just gazed impassively into the distance. It didn’t care that she’d come. She realized that she hated it. Loathed it. She wanted to text Emily and Lucy and tell them to come tear it down.

Emily and Lucy had been a few years older than Madeline. Wherever they’d been housed, they would have been Culminated by now. 

“Well, there must be some reason you wanted to see it in the flesh.” Adam, whirring, leaned down to examine the small plaque affixed to the granite pedestal. Madeline couldn’t feel her toes anymore. She tapped her pink rubber slides against the footrests of the wheelchair. 

“Nicholas Peretti, Bronze, From a Lost Study in Clay,” he read. He told her the name of the piece and paused. “I don’t understand the title, do you?” 

Snow blew across the path and her wet eyelashes froze together. 

Adam was silent as he searched the Internet. “There is no record of the model’s name for this sculpture. The clay model was most likely sculpted from life in the summer of 2023 in New York, probably at the artist’s studio.”

“21 Wooster Street. Apartment C,” she said.

“Oh! Yes.”

2023

By the time Madeline made it back to Nick’s studio in Soho that night, the street outside the loft was mayhem. Camera crews and protestors filled the block. Police were blocking off the intersections. The protestors held signs that read “Racism Sucks” and “Fat Allies” and “Queer Lives Matter” and “Suck Our Girl Dick NYU.” Madeline stepped tentatively towards the building. 

Reporters swarmed in front of her. “Hey! Do you know the professor? Why are you here?” She froze. The buzzer at the front door to his building was just fifteen feet away. If she ran she could close the distance. She looked up but couldn't see anything at his windows. Did he see her?

She tried to move forward but a bearded protestor in a hot pants and a cropped top started screaming in her face. He had terrible breath. “Fucking cis bitch! You’re his type for sure. You think your white privilege means you can cross our blockade, bitch?

Nick called her that night. “Change of plans I guess. I’m heading to France, away from this bullshit. You’re coming with me, right? Please say yes.”

###

STATUE OF LIMITATIONS — SCANDAL PLAGUED PROF FLEES USA the Post headline screamed at the newsstand inside JFK. They must have gotten his phone records because she got a dozen calls from reporters and activists before boarding the plane. 

As soon as she landed in Michigan, her parents got her a new phone number.

###

“According to his obituary,” said Adam, “the artist lived in France until his death at age 54 in Aix-en-Provence.” Adam pronounced it perfectly. “He had a successful career and wow, four children! Would you like me to show you a photo of his family? They’re very attractive.” Five. He had five children. 

“No, thank you.” 

“Did you ever visit France, Madeline?” 

“I went once,” she said. 

On that trip, she’d secretly wondered if she would run into him. Graham, an art dealer, had dragged her to a dozen terrible galleries. He loved postmodern conceptual art, places she knew Nick would never visit. 

“My late ex-husband took me to France on our honeymoon.” 

“Ah, how romantic!”

On their last morning in Paris, over croissants on the terrace at the Plaza Athénée, she’d read in the newspaper that famous American artist, ex-pat Nicholas Peretti, was dead from a sudden heart attack. She fainted at the Rodin Museum that afternoon and blamed it on her hangover. 

You taste like ambrosia. Get back here as fast as you can.

“Are you all right, Madeline?” Adam asked. 

Madeline blinked and felt a crushing weight on her shoulders, pressing her forward. If she bent over, relaxed her spine just for a moment, the weight would smash her onto the freezing pavement and push her right through it, down through wet dirt to the schist and there would be no getting up again. 

She stood up and pulled herself out of the wheelchair. She shuffled forward, feet numb, no pain now, and approached the figure. 

“Careful not to slip,” Adam called to her. 

The figure stood on a pedestal. Madeline grasped the smooth bronze hand that hung by its side. Her side. Their side. Both their hands were ice cold. The only thing they had in common anymore. 

She looked up at the impassive face. The statue turned its head and looked down. They made eye contact.

“Oh, it’s you,” the bronze figure said. “Happy birthday, Madeline.” 

The living Madeline stared at the smooth face. The likeness was uncanny. It was herself, frozen in time. “Hello.”

“I’ve been waiting so long to see you. You remember this pose, don’t you?” 

“Yes. I remember everything.”  

“It was a girl. I know you wanted to know. Just like the one you lost.” Hot tears burned the living Madeline’s frozen cheeks.

“Please, forgive me. I’m sorry. I was so young.”

The statue smiled at her. “Of course we forgive you. We love you.” 

“I love you too,” Madeline whispered. 

Bronze Madeline squeezed her cold white hand. “Goodbye then.” 

###

The snow fell faster as the wheelchair’s tires crunched back across Central Park West. The afternoon had darkened to evening. Tiny flakes collected in her exposed hands. They rolled past gray apartment buildings and ornate mansions. The wind whipped at their clothes and the machine whirred faster. 

“The current temperature is now a dangerous 20 degrees with a wind chill of eight. It was an error for me to let you stay so long.” Madeline didn’t answer him. Adam continued. “I was curious about what the sculptor named that statue, so I did some research. In ancient Greek mythology, ambrosia is the food of the Gods, and it grants ageless immortality to anyone who eats it. In Homer’s Odyssey, Athena uses a balm of ambrosia on Penelope so when she appears before her suitors, the effects of aging vanish, and they see her as she was when she was young. Isn’t that fascinating, Madeline? I wonder why he called it that.” 

Adam looked down. He stopped the wheelchair and took her vitals, then began to run, whirring faster as his legs negotiated the uneven sidewalk. The wheelchair bumped over something buried under snow and the old woman’s arm swung loose. 

A spray of snowflakes swirled through her fingers and fled on a tail of icy wind, vanishing into the past. 

THE END