The Female Pygmalion

Anya Leigh Josephs

There’s a reason women don’t do this. Pygmalion and Galatea, Leontes and Hermione, Franz and Coppelia, Nabis and Apega. You can go far into obscurity, digging up myths no one has ever heard of, and you won’t find a single story about women doing things to men. Only the other way around.

I think about it sometimes, when I walk from my studio to my apartment, past the streets where I used to work, a long time ago. Boys and girls, like the girl I used to be, stand there, shirts slipping from bare shoulders, eyes and stomachs hollow, and men watch them. Not men and women. Only men. Only ever men.

It’s not that men can’t be whores. It’s that women can’t be customers. We can be bought and sold, sculpted and devoured. Or we can section ourselves comfortably away from the base instinct to trade in flesh, as I have done in these latter years of my life. What we can’t do is tuck the dollars into the bra strap or wield the paintbrush or carve the marble.

This, more than any other, is the law of the universe I am breaking when I bring him to life.

Why do I do it? The answer is simple. Do you think I can’t have the same reasons a man would? I am getting old, and I am lonely. After a girlhood on the streets, I have found success, even fame, in my art, but I have not found love. I spent some years running from it, scarred by a decade of violent hands on my skin. Then I spent some years trying to find it and sabotaging myself at every turn. Now, old enough to know what I want, I am not afraid to build my own companionship.

How did I do it? Well, wouldn’t you like to know. In the end, art is not that different from magic, I suppose.

Sculpture is my medium these days. He is formed mostly of clay—but then, aren’t we all? Pygmalion made Galatea out of marble, of course, but that’s just a story. Marble is too unyielding. Clay is almost flesh already.

I call him Adam, because it amuses me. I’m not interested in pretending I’m doing anything other than playing God, here. Playing and winning.

Christians say women were made from a man’s rib, but that’s a mistranslation: the Hebrew says Eve grew from his side. In reality, of course, it’s the other way around: they grow in us, sometimes like flowers in a carefully tended garden, sometimes like parasites.

Only I have ever made life from my hands: not transmutation or fertilization but shaping, building up the layers of slip and earth to create this form.

When I have finished, I do not stop to admire the work of my hands. I lean in close, my breath choking in my throat. How strange it will be to kiss my own creation. To kiss, and not to be kissed. In my lifetime, have I ever taken what I wanted? No. It has only been taken from me. Even when I wanted it, I wanted it in reciprocity. To return, to give. Never to seize, for myself, as I do now, my warm lips against his cool clay.

The clay smudges against my skin, damp taste of earth and water. I suck at the spongy pallor of those lips, and I can almost taste my own vitality, spreading, flowing from my mouth to his.

But I’m not sharing my life. I’m losing it.

What do I notice first—his heart beating, or my own slowing? Is his skin becoming flesh-soft and gently warm, or is my own growing colder, colder? When I try to pull away, he is already moving. His hands grab my upper arms, inescapably strong, and my strength is already leaving me as he kisses me. Am I weak because of what he is taking from me, or weak in the face of my own desire? Desire I have tried to hide for so long, because I know how dangerous it is. I know the hunger that lives in men, the hunger that lets them trade in flesh, and still I thought I could taste of want for myself.

His lips are swollen blood-red by the time he lets me go, long, long after my struggles have stopped. Immobilized, cold and still as marble, I watch him tilt his head to one side and smile. I don’t know what I look like as a statue, but I recognize the expression in his newly-bright eyes, as blue as a newborn kitten’s. It’s the look they always gave me, once they’re sated, once they’ve finished devouring my body. A few dirty bills tossed on the bed, and that revulsion in their eyes.

It’s never been a fair exchange. What kind of deal can a prisoner make with her captor?

His hand is on the door, his perfect naked body turned away from me now. What would I say to him, if I could?

Have I made an equal exchange, gotten the payment I deserved? I wanted to make something that would be all my own. Should I blame him for having become himself at my expense?

And yet Pygmalion never paid this price. None of the lover-father-artists of myth did. Only my story ends here, frozen into marble in my own studio, watching through immobile eyes as my Adam enters into the world.

Anya Leigh Josephs was raised in North Carolina and is now a psychotherapist living and working in New York City. When not working or writing, Anya can be found seeing a lot of plays, reading doorstopper fantasy novels, or worshipping her cat, Sycorax. Anya’s short fiction can be found in Fantasy Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and Mythaxis, among many others. Her debut novel, Queen of All, is an inclusive adventure fantasy for young adults available now, with the rest of the trilogy coming soon.

“The Female Pygmalion” by Anya Leigh Josephs © 2023