Karen Townsend
The Sculptor
“I’ve never seen one so lifelike!” Jenny murmured from the doorway. The six-foot sculpture dominated the corner of the room where Jenny’s husband, Tom, removed his glasses and stood before his three-dimensional self-portrait, evaluating. He squinted, licked his thumb, and smoothed a rough patch on the statue’s left cheekbone.
“He has to be perfect if he’s going to wear my face.”
“Well,” Jenny said, “the gala isn’t for another two weeks. Plenty of time.” Her black stilettos clicked against the floorboards as she moved close to look into the sculpture’s face, found his eyes. She’d been gazing into them for weeks. He never looked away.
Tom pulled a finger across the shoulder to refine the collarbone.
“Are you almost ready?” Jenny said.
Tom leaned in, face to face with his creation. “Hmm?” The sculpture’s eyes were gray like his own. Expressive. How fascinating. I do have a rather masculine jawline. He glanced in the mirror to confirm it. And chiseled features… He looked back at the figure, then into the mirror again.
“Dinner,” Jenny said. “Remember? We have reservations tonight.”
All the best artists are tortured. And there it is on my own face—that beautiful mix of agony and intensity, sensitivity and despair. I’ve captured it exactly. An identical physical duplicate. Verbalizing it would be…unrefined. No one would understand, anyway. Not many are capable of such an undertaking. Few can even understand the importance of such a thing, let alone achieve it.
Jenny cleared her throat. “Tom?” She stepped into his line of vision, and he frowned, irritated. “You almost done?”
“He’ll be ready in time for the gala,” he murmured. He stroked the scruff on his chin, thinking. He didn’t hear her soft sigh, and soon she was so quiet Tom forgot she was standing there. When she slipped her arms around his torso, he jumped.
“We could stay in tonight,” she whispered.
“I’m working.”
“We could talk through the snags,” she said. “Like we used to.”
He shook his head. “I’ll be along in a while.”
He didn’t hear her leave.
Tom stared at his own image for another forty minutes before agreeing it could not be improved. He curled up under a blanket on the old studio sofa, gazing into his own clay face until his eyes grew heavy.
He didn’t see the statue stare at him while he slept. Didn’t see its eyebrow twitch. Didn’t notice the shift in the temperature of its clay skin, hear the scrape of dried ceramic legs taking their first steps. He didn’t see the body flush with new color like a chameleon or observe himself—once clay—now take hold of the pocketknife lying near the box he’d opened earlier that afternoon. He felt the plunge for only a moment—just long enough to lock eyes with his duplicate as the creature twisted the knife in his chest. He barely heard the familiar words it spoke as he faded: “He has to be perfect if he’s going to wear my face.” Tom saw cold reason in its eyes as it watched him die.
Jenny was almost asleep when her husband finally slid in beside her. She stiffened and her breathing slowed and deepened. But he wasn’t fooled. He nestled his body up against hers, drew her into the warm circle of his arms, pressed her tight shoulders to his chest. He nuzzled his nose into her nape. Slowly inhaled. Slid his hands across her warm curves. Felt her soften. She rolled over to face him, and he tightened his arms around her in the dark.
“How did it turn out?” she whispered.
“Perfect.”
Karen Townsend explores the deep sea of the human psyche through speculative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and a hunger to build creative community in Virginia where she explores personality theory and looks for her next adventure.