Maquettes - Litro Magazine 6 Dec 2023

This story is part of a ongoing collection of short fiction that explores a wider, at times speculative, view of illness and affliction. While topics in the thematically-linked series include health and medical issues, the stories also include moods, states of mind, and unreal illnesses. The goal of the series is to plant in the reader's mind questions of what it means to be ill, and the way illness may afflict things beyond the concerns of the body. "Maquettes" implies the idea that admiration is distinct from love; while it may be part of adoration, it can not, on its own, replace it.

The story's central conceit is a misapprehension of admiration may lead to lonliness and isolation, converse to the optimistic relationship between aspriational emotion and self-expansion expressed in Schindler et al's paper.