The Third Grace by Deb Elkink

hidden under the bonnet but there was much yet to accomplish, and he’d love more time to tinker. It was just as well that Aglaia didn’t accept his offer of a ride home, he thought as he eyed the grey sky and shifted into reverse. The lass would likely have gotten drenched, adding insult to the injury of her swollen ankle.
    Eb worried about more than Aglaia’s physical health. He saw in her a twistedness not confined to her ankle, a digression in the soul he found was not uncommon in creative dispositions. It was there when she first came to Incognito but he couldn’t explain its specific source, though he knew it involved her imagination, and he had compassion for her suffering.
    This imagination of Aglaia’s helped make their business productive, and Eb was indebted to her sheer ingenuity in costume design, which he’d been fostering all along. He saw the Creator in Aglaia’s creativity. In the whole sphere of the universe, only man had the conscious impulse of art, Eb thought—no animal painted a portrait, no vegetable drafted a blueprint, no mineral narrated a story. The exercise of art, like worship, was a human response.
    But Eb discerned in Aglaia an unnatural, occult curiosity. Maybe it was her reading, he thought as he reflected on her interest in his collection. “You are what you eat,” the saying went, but Eb believed one was what one read , and feeding the imagination with the wrong sustenance was worse than reaching for a bag of crisps instead of a carrot stick. What a person borrowed from the library bookshelves was as telling as what she loaded into her grocery trolley.
    Eb didn’t know with certainty Aglaia’s tastes in reading, but he picked up cues from how she approached her design—for example, the calculated way she studied illustrations of Hermès’s winged sandals and of the Sirens’ feathers before designing her most recent archangel. On occasion she made off-hand references to Greek mythological deities and creatures when researching ideas, and often speckled her rough costume sketches with doodles of snakes and stars and symbols. Eb held scruples against vetoing her line of inquiry; she might see his concern as censure rather than guidance. But every season brought more of the degenerating influence of mythology to her work and she seemed to be devolving, using her craft as an incantation to call up the gods of fantasy, or perhaps exploiting the gods to feed her craft. Maybe the lass thought she was specializing in her field.
    Eb downshifted behind a cube van, caught in its fumes for a block. Inner-city traffic was heavy these days with all the construction.
    Of course, Eb thought, mythology as story was an art itself. Even savages saw something behind the constellations of the sky or the stones of the ground, behind a tree or a pod or an elephant tusk, their barbarous souls stirred to seek truth by means of beauty—though they always ended up carving a face into it and bowing the knee before it.
    Humanity ever found it natural to worship, straining for a peek of the divine behind the physical realm and finding, in the case of the pagans, “a mere filth and litter of spawning gods,” as old Chesterton put it. The mythology of ancient cultures, and even the fables and folktales Eb himself found so illustrative—both Olympus’s Zeus and Pinocchio’s Geppetto—began as imaginative explanation but failed to satisfy longings only true deity could fulfill.
    The words of Saint Augustine ricocheted down the millennia to Eb: “We love those things by which we are carried along for the sake of that towards which we are carried.” It was natural to love our creativity, he thought, patting the restored dashboard of his MGB with affection, but the whole goal of driving was to get oneself home. The whole goal of art was to convey the concept it carried—the object or idea being portrayed. The moment one idolized