3
C elestial Gems had a cluttered storefront wedged between a poke bowl shop and health food store.
The shop window was decorated with a display featuring crystal balls, bushels of herbs, and Chinese fortune shakers.
A poster on the door boasted of aura cleansing, tarot reading, and palmistry.
Blake understood approximately none of it.
He arrived right before closing and was enveloped in a wall of smoky incense the moment he crossed the threshold.
The only people in the store were a couple of middle-aged women perusing the shelves of gems and a chipper-looking goth teenager sitting behind the counter, scrolling on their phone.
The name tag affixed to their shirt informed him that their name was Goose and their pronouns were they/them.
As soon as Goose spotted Blake, they set their phone down to greet him, grinning a mouthful of braces in his direction. “Hi there, what can I do for you today?
“Uh, hi,” Blake returned, awkward. “I had a meeting with Celeste for seven-thirty?”
“Ooh, are you Blake DeLuca?” Goose asked, checking a little datebook on the counter.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he nodded, shifting his weight from foot to foot. These kinds of new age-y shops tended to freak him out a little.
“Cool, cool.” Goose reached for a pen, scribbling something in the datebook.
“They should be right out.” They nodded, hitching a finger over their shoulder at the back of the shop.
Several doors branched off of a small hallway, at the end of which was a Victorian loveseat.
“They’re finishing up with another client. You can wait on the couch if you want.”
Blake nodded in thanks and rounded the counter, plopping down onto the loveseat in the back. There were several magazines laid out on a coffee table in front of it, but he ignored them in favor of his phone.
Since he’d contacted Celeste, he’d done as much research into “pygmalion” as possible. The only results were a Greek myth about a statue and a production of a play listed on YouTube as “Pygmalion Slime Tutorial Definitely Not a Bootleg”.
In addition to this, there was a scant amount of relevant information he’d been able to come across.
One was a description of a GeoCities page that talked about “pygmalions, egregores, and memetic ghosts,” but the hyperlink was broken.
There was also a long-abandoned forum discussion about an early episode of a recently-cancelled CW show where a moderator had mentioned the term.
One of the doors opened and an older woman stepped out, thanking whoever else was within.
She smiled at Blake, tears glittering in her eyes, and headed to the counter to pay for her session.
Celeste stepped out from behind her, leaning against the doorframe—as an adult, they looked less dorky than in the photos on Ryan’s cork board and much more congruent with their Instagram selfies, despite the heavy editing.
“Blake DeLuca?” Celeste asked, picking at the hem of their tartan skirt and pointing over at him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“No problem,” Celeste responded, beckoning him into the room with a swoop of an oversized stripy sleeve. “I’m Celeste Chenette. My pronouns are they/them. Come on in.”
“Cool. Mine are he/him,” Blake said, following Celeste into the little room.
It looked normal enough: there was a hanging wicker chair on one side of a coffee table and a pair of aging armchairs on the other.
Several crystals were laid out on the table alongside a pack of tarot cards and a handful of other items that Blake had no name for.
A Himalayan salt lamp provided the room with a calming saline scent and a rosy glow.
“So,” Celeste started, curling up catlike in the hanging chair and gesturing for Blake to sit. “The merman at the water park talked to you, huh?”
“Is this a common occurrence?” Blake asked, settling down on one of the recliners. Celeste shrugged, sighed, and then shook their head.
“Depends on who you ask,” they said, continuing to fiddle with their clothes. “People who are sensitive to this sort of stuff—like my family and I—experience weird things like that all the time. Pygmalions, ghosts, possessed teapots—all sorts of fun things.”
“What do you mean by ‘sensitive’ and ‘things like that’?” Blake asked, scrunching his nose. He wasn’t a fan of when people beat around the bush. “And what exactly is a ‘pygmalion’ anyway?”
“Sensitives, psychics, mediums, people with particularly good intuition,” Celeste rattled off, checking their manicure in the low light of the salt lamp. They paused, glancing over their cat-eye frames with sharp, dark eyes. “I’m sure you’ve had other experiences in the past?”
Sure, but not that he would like to admit to.
Growing up, one of his foster parents had told him that he’d gotten such bad nightmares about a “rotten lady” that they’d had to switch him to another room in the house.
Years later when he’d been bored and stoned, Blake had Googled his old address and came across a news report of an aged corpse being discovered at the property back in the 80’s.
A photo from the old woman’s obituary was included at the bottom of the article and—eager as he was to write it off as a coincidence—Blake couldn’t shake how eerily familiar she looked to the decaying figure from his youth.
Other little things had happened, too. Weeks before Matt’s mom had died, Blake had a recurring dream of her walking up a staircase with a dead end and disappearing at the top.
He’d also just… known that his high school math teacher was pregnant weeks before she mentioned it to the class.
Even as of late he’d seen stuff moving on the edges of his vision.
Little things like that, which he had written off as a trick of the eye, or coincidence, or him being observant—stuff that he didn’t have an explanation for.
“I guess,” he admitted, reluctance creeping into his tone. Celeste adopted a knowing smile, their expression looking more than a little contemptible in that moment.
“I know that face.” They chuckled, dropping out of their chair and walking over to the table with the salt lamp. They gestured to a Keurig next to it. “Want some?”
“Sure,” Blake responded without even knowing what had been offered. “And what do you mean by that ?”
Celeste popped a pod in and placed a mug in the receptacle. “I can tell you’ve seen stuff your whole life, but you’ve been able to write it off up until now.” They hummed as the water boiled. “Like you were seeing things or hadn’t gotten enough sleep lately. Things like that.”
Blake flinched at being called out. “Maybe.”
Celeste laughed. “‘Maybe’,” they repeated, their tone soft and amused. “It’s okay. I see ghosts and I tell fortunes for a side-gig while I work on my book. There’s nothing you can tell me that’ll shock me.”
The Keurig filled the mug and Celeste picked it up, handing it to Blake. “So when did it start talking to you?”
“The merman?”
“No, the tea,” Celeste said with a sardonic roll of their eyes. “Yes the merman, it’s why you’re paying me twenty-five dollars per half-hour session.”
Blake sputtered into his drink. “I thought it said twenty on the website!”
“Late evening sessions are extra. Now do tell,” Celeste responded, popping in another Keurig pod and making themself a cup as well.
Blake sighed, his brow scrunching in frustration. “It was yesterday morning. I’ve been working there for over a year—as a lifeguard during summer and a security guard during the off-season—but nothing weird has happened in all that time.”
He took a sip of the tea. “I was doing the slide inspection for the morning and it— he — started talking to me out of the blue. He wanted my energy drink.”
Celeste laughed. “As demanding as ever.”
“You know him?” Blake asked, lowering his teacup. Celeste nodded.
“My mom took me to the water park once when I was little,” they said. “If I remember correctly, he asked for my churro.”
“Are you… not supposed to feed him?” Blake frowned. “Will that make him too powerful or something?”
“No, I’m afraid that’s not how pygmalions work,” Celeste waved the notion away with a flap of their hand. “I doubt he’d be able to taste it anyway.”
“Okay, you didn’t end up explaining it to me—what is a pygmalion?” Blake asked again.
Celeste ducked down, fingertips fluttering over the spines of a set of books stacked below the Keurig table. They grabbed one entitled Greek Mythology , flipped to a bookmarked page, and set the text down on the coffee table in front of Blake.
“It’s a bit of a misnomer,” Celeste said, tapping the page.
“Pygmalion” was written out in the center in a fanciful script. An illustration on one side depicted a man embracing a marble statue. The picture on the other page was of a sumptuous woman labeled “Aphrodite,” her arms outstretched lovingly.
Celeste explained, “So there was this guy named Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses —he was either a king or a sculptor or both. Essentially, he overreacted after looking at a prostitute and decided to become celibate and do sculpting instead of sex.”
“Wow,” Blake responded, tone flat.
“But eventually he managed to sculpt a statue so beautiful that he fell in love with her and started treating her like his wife. Kissing her, screwing her, bringing her presents—the full nine yards,” Celeste went on.
“One day he prayed to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, and she decided to turn the sculpture into a real woman to be his wife. She didn’t have a name in the original version, but she was retroactively named Galatea sometime in the 1700’s.
“In our community we use the term ‘pygmalion’ to describe an effigy that has been brought to life,” Celeste explained.
At Blake’s perplexed expression they provided: “An effigy is a statue, a painting, a doll, whatever.
Anything that looks like a person. They can really only be interacted with and seen by sensitives.
“Some people think that they’re the result of curses—trapped souls.
Others think that they’re new souls created to occupy the effigy.
” Celeste gazed into their cup, rounding the coffee table to look down at the pages of the book.
“But I have it on good authority that it’s a blend of the two.
The creator of the effigy poured so much love, energy, and devotion into the creation process that it became a vessel to contain the soul of a loved one who passed away. ”
“You think that’s what happened to the merman?” Blake asked.
Celeste shrugged. “If he’s a pygmalion, then that should be the case.”
“But is there something else it could be?” Blake asked. “Like a demon or…?”
Celeste simply smiled. “Well, there’s one way to check.”