Beside him stood a man dressed head to toe in rich reds and blacks, accented with gold buttons and chains and jewellery. His boots were buckled with gold, his hands were covered in black satin gloves, and upon his head sat a broad-rimmed hat with a white feather in the band. The clothes screamed wealth, if not style – though perhaps they whispered a style to come.

“M. Desrosiers!” Jacques cleared his throat. “Pardon me, sir, but I was not expecting you.”

“No matter.” M. Desrosiers smiled and patted Jacques on the shoulder. “I’ve come to take a look on my commission.”

Something cold shifted in Jacques’ bowels. The commission: it was the one thing he didn’t want to think about, and the one thing he couldn’t stop thinking about. It was beautiful, it was hideous, and for better and worse, it was the only thing that kept him alive.

If it hadn’t been for the chance encounter with M. Desrosiers three months ago, on a moonless foggy night, when Jacques planned to get well drunk and then to go looking for trouble, whether in the dark alleys of Lyon or in the waters of the Saône or by means of the loaded pistol he kept in his pocket, he might finally have been done with it all. But when they ran into each other just outside Fournier’s, M. Desrosiers insisted they enter the bar and share wine. And when Jacques told him of his misery, of his heartache, of giving up, M. Desrosiers insisted further.

“I can’t do it anymore,” Jacques said. “Every breath I draw is torture. All I want is to hold her again, to feel her skin against mine.”

“There’s no greater pain, than that of the heart,” said M. Desrosiers. “But this is the well, from which we draw art. Tell me, what do you intend to do with the piece?”

“I don’t know. I will smash it.”

“Impossible,” M. Desrosiers said. There was no alarm in his voice, just a statement of fact. “I’ll not hear another word. I’m commissioning you to finish it.” And the price he offered, coupled with the wine, was not something Jacques could refuse.

Jacques lit another cigarette. “This way, sir.” He took his patron to his workshop, a dusty place filled with statuettes, busts, blocks of various stones and wooden frames, a place dominated by a column, of a man’s height, covered by a white cloth that promised severe edges. A stool sat before it, and hammers and chisels littered the floor, scattered like afterthoughts.

“Show me,” said M. Desrosiers, circling the covered statue.

“It’s not finished.” It cannot possibly be finished.

“Art never is. Reveal it.”

“It’s grotesque.” A cruel mockery.

“Impossible. Your hands are magical – they sing to the stone. Come, do not keep me waiting.”

Jacques tarried only a moment longer, and then listlessly he pulled at the cloth.

There was a radiant gasp. “Marvelous,” said M. Desrosiers. “She’s simply magnificent.” He touched the cold marble, placed his hands on the midriff, ran his palm up the perfectly smooth abdomen. Cupped an ice cold breast.

Jacques felt his throat harden.

“Mm,” said M. Desrosiers, his thumb and forefinger cradling a nipple. “Such attention to detail! So like the real thing!” His hand slid to the abdomen again, and then began sliding lower, following her contours, following the map of her muscles and flesh, lower, ever lower–

“Sir!” Jacques grabbed the other’s hand. “Sir, please. It’s unfinished. Very delicate.”

M. Desrosiers locked eyes with him for just a moment, but then a wide grin bloomed on his face. “Of course! Of course! How boorish of me to interfere with the genesis of art. But I tell you, you have made an exquisite piece here. It’s so like life.”

Jacques felt the cold in his guts roil. He beheld the work that consumed him: the statue of Camille. The torso of Camille, rather. She stood on the stumps of her hips and she had no arms. Neither had he been able to bring himself to carving her head, her precious face. Not yet. Not ever, perhaps.

But lifelike? Yes, Jacques had to admit that was true. He knew the map of her. His fingers had traced her every path, and he’d drunk deeply of her, gotten lost in her shallows. He couldn’t count the nights they’d spent in soft embrace, or the fervent daylight moments they’d stolen together. There was no greater love, he knew, and she was forevermore his heart.

It was M. Desrosiers that had introduced them. M. Desrosiers, his enigmatic patron, the man who discovered Jacques, who secured his first commissions and helped him build a name for himself. The man convinced of magic hands, convinced that there was nothing they could not sculpt. The man who knew very well what he was doing, when he brought Jacques and Camille together, and then left them alone.

Ah, but this! This cold, dead stone – it merely looked like Camille, once. Looked like her, before her death, before her murder. It was hard and unyielding, and had none of the vibrant warmth of the real thing, of his muse. This – this was a horrid effigy and no more.

“You have outdone yourself,” M. Desrosiers said. “Truly, your work honours my niece.”

“It’s unfinished,” Jacques whispered.

“I have a hunch it soon will be. I’ve a sense for these things, as you know. No magic hands myself, but a sense about art, yes. Now come, we will celebrate your progress and looming breakthrough.”

M. Desrosiers brought libations. They started with wine and moved on to absinthe, and all the while M. Desrosiers talked about his views on art, and how through it, he firmly believed, man could pierce the veil.

“Through force of will alone,” he said, “to create. Like God.” Jacques’ vision swam but M. Desrosiers seemed cogent no matter how much he downed. “But the conditions must be right. We must truly want it, as only the empty heart of the artist wants.”

“Soon,” M. Desrosiers said. “You are my most prized sculptor in all of my stables. Soon, you will prevail. I don’t doubt it. Now, I leave you to it.”

Jacques finished what remained of the bottles after his guest departed, deep in the black of night. The man was strange, and always appeared at just the right time, or just the wrong time. It was M. Desrosiers that introduced him to Camille, and then later, introduced him to the news of her death. It was he that found her. Strangled, they said, among the rose bushes on the family estate. The murderer, never found.

It was he… Jacques didn’t know if it was he. M. Desrosiers was the last to see her alive – that didn’t mean anything. Besides, it was disrespectful to harbour such suspicions about the man who funded him. Besides, it was too terrible to consider, if. If M. Desrosiers had played a role. If instead of doing something about it, Jacques had merely taken those funds.

Jacques downed the rest of the absinthe, and settled into fitful, fanciful dreams. In his mind Camille came back to him. He embraced her statue and in the moonlight, she turned into his lost love. They danced through the night and laughed and he twirled her faster and faster.

A thousand questions filled his mind – how had she returned? What was the other side like? Did she still love him? Did she know he still loved her? – but all were strangled by his pressing need to hold her, to have her. They loved like it was their last day, their first day, their only day; and he fell asleep in her embrace, tangled in sheets, feeling the warmth of her touch once more.

By morning, that touch had grown cold.

He awoke to a piercing headache and found himself draped over the unfinished statue, the headless, faceless cadaver, the armless and legless corpse. The pale imitation of a woman whose voice he could barely remember, whose touch he craved more than breath itself.

Cold, cold, cold.

But soft.

He gripped her shoulder and found his fingers sank into the marble, deformed it like – like skin. Grey skin, pallid skin, and webbed with dark veins, nearly black. He rose to sit, tried to lift her, and found she bent backwards, as though she had a spine. As though she were flesh. Dead flesh.

Jacques recoiled, swore. What was this? he wondered. Was this the drink? Had his mind finally broken?

That was when he noticed himself sinking into his bed.

His sheets, bunched in his tightly closed fist, had themselves grown soft and veiny, and covered in irregular tufts of hair. And the bed – a large slab of fibrous meat, heaved under his weight. His other hand sunk into it and something cracked. He pierced the surface, exposing a shattered, brittle bone, and a gush of foul blood.

Jacques screamed. The bed heaved under him as he leapt to the floor, and the parquet beneath his feet turned almost at once into a meshwork of impossible fingers, too long and too short, with too many joints, fused at all angles, all writhing and snapping and cracking under his panicked retreat.

Every tool he touched turned into a shivering mass of malformed bone and sinew, screaming of wrongness, and every wall he stumbled into blossomed into a rippling bruise, a labyrinthine organ, a tortured thing filled with fluids. The air in his studio grew hot and moist and blood and other things dribbled from a thousand open sores.

His shrieking unending, he charged for his door and the stairway beyond, but no sooner had he placed his hands on the heavy wood than it cracked into a web of ribs, hiding a colossal, misshapen heart of dozens of chambers, each beating a deafening drum and spurting gore everywhere.

Jacques turned and fled for his balcony – too late. The balcony itself became a broad, lolling tongue which rolled back and kept him inside, and thousands of jagged, splintered teeth erupted from both the ceiling and the floor.

The whole tower shuddered, ground against itself, writhed in fury and meaningless pain, and collapsed under its own weight. It pitched forward and splattered into the Saône, with a finality that said ‘no more’.

I assume there would be less such pessimism after they cut USAID.

Medias have been paid by private and public money throughout the decades to write pessimistically about China, while the owners of the medias made shit ton of money growing with the Chinese economy, with less competition from a population with a distorted view on China.

Why women are more prone to talk about trivialities and men about philosophy and politics when drunk?

I’ve almost never met a woman who was seriously interested in history, philosophy, politics, classical literature, or any complex and boring subject that required deep analysis to understand. Whether drunk or sober.

Women do like to pretend they’re interested in these things when they’re trying to look good or when they’re trying to impress you. But if you attempt a discussion, you’ll quickly experience shocking ignorance and a fleeting attention span and feel like you’re talking to a child.

I can only discuss these matters with other men.

My ex-girlfriend from El Salvador sympathized with me over the genocide in Gaza by saying “I’m sorry for what’s happening in your country.” I’m Egyptian.

The genocide had been all over the news and social media for a year and a half and the president of her country is half-Palestinian. Yet she didn’t know if the genocide was happening in Gaza, Egypt, or Syria. She would’ve believed it was happening in Turkey, Cyprus or Bulgaria if I’d told her. That’s how fucking stupid she was.

But as long as we were just jumping from one triviality to another, we could talk for hours every day, and we did.

Simple Beef Tips with Gravy

Ingredients

• 1 to 3 pounds beef tips or lean stew meat
• 1 envelope Lipton onion soup
• 1 can golden mushroom soup
• 1/2 cup red wine
• 1 can mushrooms, drained

Instructions

1. Mix everything in a slow cooker.
2. Cook on LOW for 7 to 9 hours.

What are the most surprising knowledge gaps you’ve encountered while teaching?

I don’t have a ton of teaching experience; it’s all university-level stuff, either as a grad student or — in a bizarre turn — as an adjunct for one semester. (That’s a weird story; maybe I’ll tell it in another answer.)

Anyways, one surprising knowledge gap stood out to me.

For context, I was teaching a calculus course over the summer to in-coming high school students before their first semester of college. This was part of a larger program, so the kids had full days — the calculus course was the “heavy lifting,” but they also had a writing course, a study skills workshop, leadership courses, etc. There were about 15–20 kids in the program, and they were aspiring science and engineering majors.

The calculus course was a brutal 3 hours a day. No human can maintain focus in a straight lecture setting for that long, so I made the executive decision to have an hour-some-odd lecture period, a break, and then do an hour-some-odd of problem solving. There was homework every night.

It took maybe an embarrassingly long time for me to notice, but one kid’s work didn’t really add up. I mean, sure, not everyone gets calculus right off the bat. But his errors didn’t make sense. I kept my eye on him for maybe a week, and then I eventually pulled him aside for some real talk.

After some initial evasiveness, I got down to the problem: he basically just doesn’t know algebra.

I asked him how the hell he got as far as he did, and he kind of shrugged it off. “I just look at what other people do.”

So yeah… I’d call that a gap. A calculus student not knowing how to solve something like $7x-3=18$

, or even being able to add or subtract fractions.

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As an epilogue, I told him it wasn’t too late. But if he wants to have any meaningful chance at an engineering education, he has to solve this. I told him it made absolutely no sense to sit in a calculus class. So we went to the library and got a few algebra books. I told him his goal is to work through the whole thing by the end of the summer; that it wouldn’t be easy, and that unfortunately I didn’t have time to lecture for him. He had to be self-motivated, and I’d be available to answer any questions.

He was (reasonably) concerned about his grade in the calculus class. I told him I’d make separate exams for him on algebra, and that I’d give him whatever grade he earned on the exams, if he promised to take the ordinary calculus class in the Fall semester.

I’m not sure what happened to him; I went to law school the next semester. I hope he made progress!

What has an employee said that immediately caused you to fire them?

Well, this is going back a few years when I was supervisor of a company that dealt with customers on a very personal basis. We hired a new woman. She had a fair degree of responsibility in dealing with customers. Her problem was she didn’t have the personality for it. She was nice on the phone, but every time she hung up, she would say something nasty about them.

For exampl… hangs up “That was Mrs. Jones – the bottle blonde. She dyes her hair but thinks nobody knows.”

She did this all the time. I finally spoke to her and said “These people are our customers. And human beings. Lets be a little more respectful.”

So one day she’s on the phone with a valued customer. She hangs up and goes on a tirade about his customer.

“That was Mrs. Abernathy – I hate dealing with that old bag.” and she continued on , calling this woman several names, and disparaging her family.

I was a little pissed by her attitude. However, turns out when she put the phone down it didn’t hang up properly and Mr.s Abernathy was still on the other end. She heard everything this woman said.

The next day, She came into the office and asked to see me. She rattled off everything this woman said. I apologized to Mrs. Abernathy and told her she was a valued customer, and that personally I thought she was a beautiful person.

I then went into the next room and promptly fired the offending woman.

New Homes In America Are Falling Apart, And People Are Trapped