Miller.epub | Galatea - Madeline

Before I had lungs to breathe, I had the shape he gave me. He called it perfection. He told me that my cold, white marble hips were the standard by which all living women should be judged. He had prayed to the gods for a wife who would never talk back, never age, and never turn her eyes away from him.

But Pygmalion forgot one crucial thing about living breathing creatures.

He froze. The hammer in his hand—the same hammer he used to chip away at new blocks of stone in his studio—dropped to the floor with a loud, heavy thud. He looked at me with genuine terror in his eyes. He loved the goddess-given flesh, but he was absolutely terrified of the mind that lived inside it. "What did you say?" he hissed. Galatea - Madeline Miller.epub

"You are so beautiful," he whispered to me the next morning, running his fingers down my arm.

"I am alive," I repeated, my voice growing stronger, louder, and steadier. "And I am leaving." Before I had lungs to breathe, I had the shape he gave me

I picked up Paphos from her cradle. She was light and warm in my arms. I didn't take the silk dresses or the gold jewelry he had bought to decorate me. I didn't need them.

In the beginning, I was exactly what he wanted. I stood where he placed me. I wore the heavy silk robes that scratched my brand-new skin. I smiled when he told me to smile, and I kept my eyes fixed on his face. He called me his greatest creation. He did not call me his wife; he called me his masterpiece. He had prayed to the gods for a

Then the gods listened. They put warm, rushing blood into my stone veins. They gave me a pulse.