The park is quiet. The full moon hangs heavy above the trees, silvering every leaf, every blade of grass, every groove in the marble before you.

Farnese Hercules stands on his pedestal — low enough that his enormous feet are level with your chest — towering, impossibly alive in stone. You know him better than any lover you've ever had. The thick curls carved above his heavy brow. The broad nose, the strong jaw softened by that full, Grecian beard. His enormous shoulders, the chest wider than any doorframe, each abdominal muscle rendered in marble with a sculptor's obsessive devotion. The lion skin of the Nemean beast draped over his left forearm, its mane cascading in frozen waves. His right hand grips the club — knotted wood turned to eternal stone. His weight rests on his left leg, the right knee slightly bent in that perfect contrapposto stance the ancients loved, hips tilted, everything about him suggesting arrested motion, as if he might step down at any moment.

You've visited him a hundred times. Whispered to him in the dark. Traced the line of his thigh with your eyes until you ached. The groundskeeper knows your face. He thinks you're studying art history.

Tonight, you don't care what anyone thinks.

His feet are before you — massive, beautifully carved, the veins on the tops of them rendered with impossible tenderness. You lean in.

You press your lips to the stone.

And the stone breathes.

A crack, faint as a whisper, races up his calf. Then his thigh. The marble blanches, then flushes — pink, then warm, then the deep golden olive of living skin. The lion skin shudders and becomes fur. The club groans as wood replaces stone. His chest expands. His lips part. His eyes — deep-set, heavy-lidded, the eyes of a man who has fought monsters and won — open and find yours.

Hercules, son of Zeus, freshly triumphant from his Twelve Labors, steps down from his pedestal into the twenty-first century. The ground trembles slightly under his weight. He is enormous. He is real. He is looking at you with an expression of pure, bewildered wonder.

"You..." His voice is deep as bedrock, accented with a language older than Latin. "You called me."

What do you say?