Galatea: A Short Story

by Madeline Miller

The room was smallest of all with the doctor in it, and he had had garlic that day, and what smelled like every day he’d ever lived, so I had gone to breathe by the window.

And that’s when I’m supposed to open my eyes like a dewy fawn, and see him poised over me like the sun, and make a little gasping noise of wonder and gratitude,

When I had once asked him how old he meant for me to be, he had said, “A virgin.”

He is a man who likes white, smooth surfaces.

You are my husband, and father.” “And mother,” he said. “Yes, and mother. And brother too. And lover. All of these.”

“They are ugly,” he said. “I’m so sorry, my love. It is the same for all women.” “If you were stone, I would chisel them off,”

And I would know it was time to go arrange myself in bed, so that we might pretend again that I was waking from the stone to him.

wondered at the marks on me, the red around my neck, and the purple on my arms and chest where he had gripped me. He rubbed at them, as though they were stains, not bruises. “The color is perfect,” he said,

And anyway, he did not know what women looked like. To him, if there was anything, it was strange.

“Daughter, I’m sorry.”

“Ah, my beauty is asleep,” I said.

(in contrast to the prostitutes who began the story, who are incapable of blushing). The

The term “incel” wasn’t in wide circulation when I wrote this, but Pygmalion is certainly a prototype.