Oh, and also? Hot. (edit: the story! The story's hot!)

And oddly, that's the part that disturbed me the most about it.

I just thought it was damned good porny fun. The statue, though - that disturbed me.

I thought it would disturb me, but ended up on Deb's side of the fence, thinking it was damn good porny fun.

cereal: just out of curiousity Plei, what made you come up with Holland for your story? I like the choice, but the Mayor would have come to my mind before Manners.

Umm, I was making up silly pairings when ranting on Better Buffy Fics one day about something. That was the silly one that came to mind. Well, I think it was on BBF. Hmm.

Cereal:

My Sunday100, Submerged

He stopped screaming after a day, stopped trying to explain, or make Connor listen. There was just no point to it.

Trapped in a cell of his son's making, he waits, counting the days and marking time. Memorial Day's the first big one; if he listens, he thinks he can hear people out celebrating on their boats. Either that, or it's the voices replaying in his head as hunger and isolation take their toll on his mind.

He keeps counting. What's real? What's not? It starts to slip away and merge. Memory or fantasy?

On Father's Day, the counting stops.

I like the drabble Plei. Is there a theme to them this week? Yours is the first one I've seen.

Holidays, in point of fact.

Lots of Christmas and New Years ones up this week.

About the same age I am now.

There's an elegant way to deal with the maths!

connie, I love it. All of it. Angelus, Dru, Spike, Giles...

Plei, that drabble is wonderful.

Plei, Plei, Plei. Good grief. And yet it's good. t /horrified.

Deb, your Darla stuff is gorgeous. And I'm loving Lizard's Willow dream, and Connie's Giles & co. It's all good!

Meanwhile, I have been possessed by a most peculiar impulse:

Galatea

Other sculptors talked about finding the form hidden inside the stone, but he never thought of it like that. He never for one moment lost sight of the fact that it was his talent at work, making something beautiful out of blunt rock or wood or ivory.

He didn't call her Aphrodite as she slowly grew under his hands. She wasn't a goddess, and she wasn't modelled on sketches of some whore as other carven goddesses were. Galatea. She sprang from his brain, pristine and perfect and whiter than sea foam, and his hands gave her shape. Untouched. Her flesh would not decay. There would be no stinks and sounds, no snoring or farting or snorts of unkind laughter. There would be no ugly hair marring her skin. No pimples, no dimples, no morning breath. No aging. No ugliness. She was his, wholly and unquestionably. No fathers, no lovers, no friends. Nothing in her world but him. He chose her pose and angled her limbs. He bowed her head and lowered her eyes. He crafted her curves perfectly to fit his own hand, biting his lip as he carved the surface smooth. He trembled for her, and she let him. She was exquisite, the pinnacle of womanhood, the sweet, silent epitome of his every desire. His ivory virgin. He wrapped his arms around her and closed his mouth over her chaste lips, licked the breeze-borne sea salt from the curve of her shoulder and the swell of her belly. He ground himself against her forgiving skin until his own flesh felt like ivory, and then again like flesh. The curve of her buttocks was unbearably dear to him, and the line of her neck was more beautiful than any living thing.

He set her on a pedestal and adored her in shafts of sunlight and in the darkness of the moon.

And then, disaster. His hubris was rewarded.

Sunlight had licked her ivory hips and pallid thighs to bodyheat and he was tracing every inch with his fingers and his lips, lost in the bliss of his perfect, silent love -

Until she moved.

He froze, uncomprehending, and he heard her gasp as her dainty knees parted gently just a finger's breadth or less. He stared. She moved again.

"Master?" she said in her brand new voice, and he saw that her skin was flushed with colour and her chest had quickened into life. "Father?" He stepped back as if burnt, and a tear welled up in her eyes. "Husband?" She stepped clumsily down from the pedestal and in that instant he hated her, hated her more than words could say. She was alive, and he did not know her.

He took her anyway, for old times' sake, with his hand over her mouth to stifle her living cries. It was like lying with carrion. She was too warm, too soft; she was pliable and willing and it revolted him. Not yet wrinkled, not yet flawed, but she was trapped in time now and subject to its laws. She would spoil and decay.

He thought of her cool unliving thighs and the obedient enigma of her downcast ivory face, and he spent himself inside her at last, then lay quiet in her embrace. She kissed his throat. He could kill her now, he thought calmly, and nobody would stop him; she was his, after all, his creation, his creature. His disappointment. In death her flesh would cool and harden. There might be ointments, preservatives - there might be a way to fix it all again. To make it like before.

He looked at her, flushed and happy, and his stomach churned. He did not want her, even in death. She was nothing to him.

"Go," he said. And when she stared at him with tears in her eyes he dragged her to her soft new feet and threw her out into the street. "Go." The door banged closed. He stared at his chisel, at his tools, and he thought again how long it had taken him to find the perfect piece of ivory.

He had done it before. He could do it again.