“The Time Of Heroes” by Paul Silverman
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         For quite a while, the woman with three breasts flirted with becoming a bona fide fashion designer. Now she was pursuing this goal in earnest. She had found a rep who would handle all the client and supplier contact, allowing her to keep working inside the walls of her home. She had come upon an ancient floral pattern based on the Narcissus, and she began adapting it to various accessories, such as fabric belts and handbags cut out of rare hand-dyed goods she’d located in the south of France. She called her brand just that, Narcissus, and designed her own logo. The name gave her a chuckle. To her female customers it would mean a flower. But to her it would mean the ideal imaginary male. The legendary male so taken with his own beauty he can?t help staring at its reflection.
         The act of naming her brand caused the woman with three breasts to take a new look at her own name - Sandra. Her decision, in the end, was to re-style it, and she began calling herself Alessandra. In her view, the name was still the one she?d been born with. All she was doing was using its superlative form.
         From the fabric store, Alessandra hurried towards the mall walkway that opened onto the museum gardens. She had to pass right in front of a splashy lingerie store, an experience that made her physically and emotionally ill. Her legs shook and the sweat poured out of her. Every tart of a window mannequin was a reminder of the cross she had to bear - her lifelong dread of ever stepping over the threshold of such a store, of ever going near any retail counter anywhere to acquire a bra. All of hers were home-made, and it goes without saying that the quality and workmanship of these pieces exceeded anything sold in stores. But the real coup was the innovative construction she had devised, a system of rigging and cupping and cinching that, so long as she stayed fully dressed, made her unique abundance seem to be nothing more than normally opulent curves.
         After the terror of the lingerie windows came the joy of the walkway, the relief of escaping her monsters and the thrill of entering a domain of soothing pleasures, a true oasis. First came the canopy of open sky, then the fountains and topiary and colonnades, and then the museum itself, timeless and palatial. She walked the huge halls resolutely, buoyed by the sharp echo of her footsteps. She hurried by the queue forming at the café, without so much as a thought about stopping for lunch. This was the first day of a new exhibit, a major showing of classical sculpture, not a day to let a croissant and salad steal time from what really mattered.
         The woman with three breasts climbed the temple-like steps to the highest floor of the museum. She bought her ticket for the exhibit, titled “The Time of Heroes,” showed it to a seated guard and entered the exhibit hall. For a moment she stood perfectly still, just to let the cells of her body adjust to the sudden change. Only her eyes moved, and everywhere they darted they found the same thing. Men of stone. Perfect men. Men whose god-like limbs and torsos were unchanged after thousands of years.
         Slowly, Alessandra began to move from figure to figure, circling each one like a cat. She paid no attention to the little plaques that explained whether the sculptor was Phidias or Polykleitos or Myron, or whether the sculpted male was a Herakles who had just killed a lion, a Dionysos on a bash, a Hermes about to take flight, or some unknown athlete scraping oil from his ribs. What she was after was a shoulder, a hip, a wrist that struck her as especially agile and powerful. Her mind and her eye worked together, feverishly, as photographer and camera, snapping prizes she could take home with her and keep, summoning them at will for her own physical pleasure. And just as soon as she had made her way through the ranks, she turned from the exit door and retraced her steps the entire length of the hall, once again letting her gaze spill ecstatically over every inch of stone skin. On her third and final trip, when she had reached her saturation point, she let out a small laugh, just audible enough to turn a guard?s head. She was recalling that line from the greeting card, and thinking how very right the line was.

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