Even As You and I

A chisel-wielding demiurge named Carillo fashions marble into living sighs beside his luminous wife Selma, their cottage a tabernacle of mutual wonder—until the Devil, bored by such purity, dispatches a trident of imps whose names hiss like cracked absinthe bottles: Lust, Drink, Self-Pity. The studio becomes a brothel of shadows; marble dust turns to ash on the tongue. Carillo, drunk on synthetic stars, signs his honor away with a stylus carved from his own rib, then wakes to find Selma’s silhouette erased from the bedsheet. In the crater of abandonment, Loyalty—an androgynous angel wearing Selma’s face—descends, presses a penitent chisel into her palm, and under a splintered cruciform moon she carves Repentance into the floorboards. The Devil, allergic to such salt, recoils; the couple rise, stripped of Youth and Honor yet clothed in the burnished copper of Experience.