Page 111 of There Are No Saints

The original old-fashioned lamps illuminate the studio, throwing pools of golden light down from the walls. Mara steps in and out of these pools, sometimes shadowed, sometimes glowing. She twirls slowly so her skirt bells out once more, revealing the long, slim stems of her legs. Her mouth opens in awe.

“All this space is yours?” she says.

“No one alive has seen it. Except me and you.”

“Secrets are lonely.”

“Only people who want company are lonely.”

“Only people who are scared of other people want to be alone,” Mara teases me, her quick smile displaying her pearly teeth.

I draw closer to her, watching her eyes widen, watching how she has to force herself to stand still as I approach. The impulse to flee is always present. Mara’s instincts are good . . . but she never listens to them.

“Which of us is scared right now?” I growl.

She stands her ground, looking up at me.

“Both of us, I think,” she murmurs.

My stomach clenches.

“And yet we’re both here,” she says. “Are you going to show me what you’re working on?”

“I haven’t made anything sinceFragile Ego,”I admit. “But I plan to start something new tonight.”

A shiver runs across her shoulders -- this time from pure excitement.

“You’re going to let me watch you work?” she asks.

“You’re going to help me. We’re going to do it together.”

She can hardly breathe.

“Right now?”

“Soon. I want to show you something first.”

I take her to the adjacent room, where I keep the half-dozen sculptures I never completed. The ones I could never quite make right.

I think of them as aborted fetuses. Unable to grow as they should. Abandoned by their creator because they died in the womb.

They’re ugly to me, and yet I can’t let them go because I know what they should have become.

Mara walks among them, slowly, examining each one. It pains me for her to see them, but I have to know if she sees them as I do—ruined and unfixable.

She’s silent, looking at each piece from every angle, taking her time. Her brows knit together in a frown, and she chews on the edge of her swollen lower lip.

Mara’s always biting at herself. It makes me want to bite her, too.

“These are the ones you couldn’t finish,” she says at last.

“That’s right.”

She doesn’t ask why. She can sense the imperfections of each. To a random person, they might look just as good as the pieces I’ve proudly displayed. But to the discerning eye, they’re as dead as a fossil. Worse, because they never actually lived.

She pauses by the last sculpture. This was my most expensive failure—I’d been working on a chunk of meteorite dug up in Tanzania. The thing weighed two tons when I started. I had to design a custom plinth to hold it.

“This one could be saved,” Mara says.

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