Metamorphica: Fiction by Zachary Mason

Author:Zachary Mason
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Sample Book
ISBN: 9780374208646
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2018-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

1

OVID

Ovid was a Roman poet. An early success, he despised his own work. He sought out Aphrodite, Rome’s tutelary goddess, in the hope of striking a bargain. He ended up exiled to the shore of the Black Sea.

Ovid walks at twilight through dry rolling hills. A woman is before him, trailing her hands through the tall grasses which smoke wherever her languid touch falls, blackening and writhing and turning to ash. Fire roars and pops behind them, ruddy serpents of flame seething over the hills, but she’s singing a tuneless song and seems not to notice.

He’s about to speak when she says, “Not literature for you, but the literary life, because you’re lazy, and love company, and what you’d most like is to be famous without writing a word. Your work will be forgotten when you die, or a little before, though the memory of your persona will last a little longer.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s why I found you.”

“It would take exile,” she says, still not looking back. “You’d have to give up everything. You would be transformed.” He feels her waver for a moment, but then she says, “You wouldn’t be willing.”

“But I am,” he says. “I’d give anything, everything…”

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