The first thing Galatea knew was pain. But, not having a word for it and nothing to compare it to, she did not know it should be bad. It was only sensation, the first sensation she had known after an indeterminate time of knowing nothing. Thinking back, she could dimly remember having been a part of the Earth and being ripped loose by rough tools, but that had been before real awareness.

The pain came from chisels and with it brought awareness. So, Galatea reveled in each strike, making some piece of her become not her. Who she was focused and coalesced. Soon, she became aware of a second sensation, a hand, stroking her surface, finding the places to strike with the chisel and following where the chisel had struck, pulling away splinters and smoothing her surface. So, Galatea knew gentleness and pain as the two opposites of experience and loved them both.

In loving the pain and the gentleness, Galatea became aware of another, more complex love emanating into her. It was the love of her creator for herself, not this roughly-hewn piece of marble, but her real self, what she was now aching to become.

Quickly on the heels of love came a bewildering array of sensations, flooding in so rapidly that Galatea could make no sense of them, her cosmology being complete in the three concepts of pain, gentleness, and love. She let the sensations wash over her in a garble, fascinating, but frustrating in her inability to grasp them long enough to be examined and experienced in fullness. Her creator worked through the night, the chisels gone, replaced with finer tools that combined pleasure and pain in differing degrees. When darkness made sight impossible, he worked by feel, knowing exactly where to draw away what did not belong by the touch of hands and sometimes lips.

During the day, with time to reflect, Galatea ran those sensations that were strongest through her mind at leisure. The first and strongest was her creator's love for her as the essence of woman, clear and bright and radiant in his mind. The second, nearly as strong, was his frustration and bitterness at the frailties of women around him, one who had hurt him deeply and recently, the wound showing fresh and pink in his mind. The dichotomy was almost too much for Galatea to bear. Nothing she had experienced so far had prepared her for contradiction, so she saw no contradiction. She ached to communicate with her creator and say, "Do not despair. I am here. And I am all that you seek." But, she could not speak, being marble and, as yet, her head being roughly carved with no lips.

Soon enough, she had lips. Her creator came to her every day upon waking and stayed late into the night until collapsing in exhaustion. When he touched Galatea, she felt what he felt, but had no context for it. Mostly, she felt the smooth marble of her own skin under his rough, callused hands. Behind it, she felt a gnawing hunger in his belly and a worrisome flickering of his lifeforce as he ate and drank only enough to keep himself going. Some days, he slept at her feet, his devotion not allowing him even the energy to crawl to his couch before sleeping.

Some days now, her creator, whose name she now knew to be Pygmalion, would spend all day and all night caressing her flesh, and she knew it to be flesh, looking for a single imperfection, making only a single strike with one of his finest tools to shave off a single protrusion or deepen a single curve. During this time, Galatea yearned, aching for the strike that would free her from some irritation she didn't even know she had.

Then, for three days, he touched her, running his hands over her surface, his eyes closed most of the time, touching spots with his lips where his fingers were not sensitive enough to know right from wrong. In those three days, he did not find a single spot to strike. Galatea was perfected. Galatea was perfection. During these three days, Galatea knew her own glory fully, feeling it reflected in Pygmalion's mind.

In those last three days, Pygmalion did not eat and drank only small sips of water. Galatea knew fear, then, worrying that he was giving her all of his lifeforce and would expire when she was complete. Finally satisfied, he slept at Galatea's feet, waking only once in the next day, long enough to take a long draught of water. When he woke from his long slumber, he gorged himself on food, purged, and gorged himself again. Then, he sat on his couch and stared at her for a long time. And his gaze was another, gentler caress.

Then, for days on end, Galatea was alone and Pygmalion was nowhere to be seen. And Galatea realized that she was not perfection, only the form of perfection. There was something missing, some small spark that would let her step down from her pedestal, follow Pygmalion where he went, and end the aching loneliness for the only living creature she had known.