Grace and the Greek Warrior

A Vial of Tears

The Greek statue exhibit at the Norton Museum of Fine Art was just as deserted as Grace had ever seen it in her own hometown gallery. Perseus' state stood in the corner opposite the entrance. Grace was certain he couldn't see her yet, because he hadn't called out to her inside her head.
She lingered there, reviewing the plan in her head. On the long series of flights back home from Greece, and then on to Texas, she had formulated a dozen different plans and discarded them all. She knew she would have to see the inside of the museum before she could work out what to do.

There were security cameras, of course, but the coverage had gaps. She'd struck up a conversation that morning with the guard at the front desk, pretending to be a vapid tourist who wanted the dirt on all the "really cool" local attractions, and he'd thought she was flirting, so she managed to sidle around the curved desk to chat with him while getting a glimpse at the security display. There was only one camera in each of the smaller exhibits, and none in the hallway leading to the closest set of restrooms, which seemed like a terrible oversight to Grace. But she whispered a prayer of thanks to Aphrodite anyway.

So, before she went to revive Perseus, she ducked back out of the museum and took her rental car out for a spin, looking for a clothing shop. The first thing she found was a Wal-Mart, which she wrinkled her nose at, but it was close and it was cheap. She made her best guess at Perseus' size and bought a polo shirt, a pair of jeans and a belt, a pack of underwear, and finally, a pair of flip-flops, since she was afraid of getting his shoe size wrong. No one would bat an eyelash at flip-flops in late summer in Texas, or so she hoped.

Packing it all into her ridiculously oversized purse, she paid her admission to the museum again–a different attendant was at the booth, which was lucky, because Grace hadn't considered until she came back how odd that would look–and meandered the building for a while admiring the artwork. She needed to give the attendant long enough to lose track of when, exactly, Grace had arrived. And hopefully to forget she'd come alone.

When Grace's heart started to pound with the excitement of what she was about to do, she found a bench and pretended to study a Vermeer painting while she got her breathing under control. She remembered Perseus counting her breaths for her, and had to hold back from reaching out to speak to him. If this went wrong, if this didn't work, then she wanted him never to know she'd even been here.

After two hours of pacing the polished wooden floors and pretending she was just a regular patron, she made her way to the statue exhibit and stood inside the doorway. The camera wouldn't see her here, so she pulled a red silk scarf from a pocket of her purse and draped it over her hair, looping it around her neck and tucking it into the collar of her white blouse. Her curls were her most distinctive feature, and unless she went full ninja, it was the only reasonable way to disguise herself.

She kept to the outer edge of the room, keeping her head down and approaching Perseus' statue from the side. She slipped her purse from her shoulder and set it on the floor, kneeling and drawing a small glass vial from another pocket. Her hands shook, but not from fear–she was almost certain she was hidden from view of the camera by another statue. They shook because when she touched the glass, memories flooded her of the vigil she had kept to earn Aphrodite's blessing.

In so many of the tales, stone reverted to flesh when wet by the tears of a loved one. If Perseus had still been close at hand, Grace would have tested her unblessed tears on him first–but making the extra trip to Texas seemed like a needless delay when it was likely her tears alone would fail.
The bottle of tears in her hand now, though, came from the full day and night she had spent on her knees in the ruined temple of Aphrodite outside Athens. Not knowing how to pray properly to a goddess she had never before thought was real, she had spent the hours reliving every conversation with Perseus in her head, allowing herself to say silently to him the things she never had, letting the goddess of love and desire read what was in her heart.
When morning came and Grace thought that nothing had happened, that she had failed, she stood, and swayed, and fell back to her knees weeping with exhaustion and sorrow at her failure. But as she wiped her eyes and tried to stand again, an empty vial etched with a pattern of seashells appeared on the stone before her. When she picked it up, it was full, and the tears had vanished from her face.