Of Plastic Surgeons

He stared at the wall. His mouth was hung open and drool trailed down the corners of his bluish lips. There was a glazed look in his reddened eyes, the kind of look you would expect to see in a dead animal.1

Alfred was breathing, albeit shallowly. His arms were tied to his sides in his white outfit and his legs were crisscrossed together like a tangled voodoo doll.2

Inside, Alfred was screaming. They had got him. Always, always, the good guy won…3

A strange smile overcame his face – one corner of his mouth rose, while the other seemed synchronized to move in a downward position. His eyes were still glassy, but around his eyes there were minute creases. Giggles escaped his throat. He felt his whole body convulse – he was on his back, next his sides, then standing and falling before colliding with the padded wall.4

Mouth full of saliva and perhaps whatever muscle relaxant the people in the coats had given him a few hours (or days) earlier, Alfred spat royally before taking a bow, as if he had an audience. All the while, he giggled and attempted to skip with his legs bound together. He hobbled and fell, chuckled and squealed. Then, he sobbed.5

His mouth was against the padded floor. He had never known that they were rubber. Maybe he could make a condom out of the floor. Giant condoms.6

Tears poured from his eyes and he wailed. Alfred was left dry and hoarse, gasping for air as he forced his body to lift himself off the white rubber floor. As he heard the door unclick, he reacted as Pavlov’s mutts may have. He dug his body into what could be called a corner in the bright white room, feeling almost safe in his chin of drool and his pants of urine.7

Three people entered, all were wearing white lab coats. One had a syringe, another had a clipboard, and the last stood behind them. All of them wore smiles. Alfred had no time to run; he was captured in such a gilded cage.8

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Several Years Earlier10

Alfred Wilt was a scrawny man, if you could even call him as such. He was short and balding at the age of thirty, with scraggly brownish hair. Always he was seen in a buttoned-up shirt, although he preferred the colors green and blue, and a pair of faded jeans that were not even popular in the nineties. His frame was awkward and stout; kyphosis made him act even more peculiar around the opposite gender and gave him the nickname of Quasimodo.11

The nearing-middle-aged man spoke too fast, too. He used his hands a lot when he talked, usually in an outrageous manner. Alfred could easily become frantic and panic, to the point of him loosening sense of where and who he was. The therapist called these moments ‘out of body experiences.’ His tendency to smile a lot, with half of his lips curved upwards and the other half pointed downwards, gave him a terrible reputation at the community college he had entered.12

It was not like he killed anyone, or anything. Alfred was a good boy, his mummy had said so. Her word was law. It was.13

Mummy was dead, though. She had died three months ago to some type of cancer, with clumps of hair that made her look like a chicken that had been put through a blender. That was when Alfred had begun his experiments. He was going to be a plastic surgeon; he was going to make himself pretty.14

Also, he was going to make people pay. They were cruel and immoral and selfish. All the fools did was tease him. Alfred was going to make them pay. He was going to reverse the thing that fate or perhaps God had given him; the mean people could become ugly, in his process of beauty.15

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The first person for his experiment was a redhead named Cherry Lane. She had a head of voluminous, luxurious bright red locks. Her lips were bright red and smelled of strawberries. Alfred knew she was a ‘lying whore,’ at least, that is what people around campus had called her.17

According to his mother, Alfred knew the basic steps on how to speak to a female. He told her that she was pretty, making her pale cheeks bloom pink, before asking to meet up with her in the library. She accepted.18

In her sandwich that she had eaten in the library (it was a Nutella and marshmallow one), Alfred had slipped crushed up pills of barbiturates. She was too sleepy to continue studying, so Alfred walked her home.19

To his home, that is.20

He began with pedicles. They are the rules to follow, his mother had told him, of plastic surgery. His mother had said that if he followed her rules that he would be a great plastic surgeon. Now he could get his revenge and better himself too.21

Alfred made sure that Cherry was asleep. He tied her wrists and ankles with a cord that he gotten from the boating section of Dick’s Sporting Goods. From his kitchen and makeshift garage (for he lived in his dead mother’s home), he retrieved several objects that his mother had called ‘surgical tools.’22

It made him giggle.23

Already he had known what he was to do with Cherry. He was going to give her a new face. Her own face was long and smooth of porcelain skin and fattened lips.24

He took an object that resembled a cutter roller that would divide a pizza in sections. Wearing gloves with little roosters across them (a gift from his dying mother), he hovered over his patient’s body. He took the cutter roller and stroked her neck gently, leaving a nice clean red line. A sewing needle and thread were close by, in case of any mishaps.25

Alfred cut out a long strip of her pale skin starting from the base of her neck, it was a large rectangle from the side of her neck. He felt sure that he had hit an artery or something of the sort. His elbows all the way up drenched in the sticky blood.26

She began to awake, unfortunately. Maybe she had always been awake, but he finally had noticed her blue-green eyes were wide and her pupils dilated. Cherry began breathing too hard.27

Honestly, he tried to calm her down. He took the piece of skin he had cut from her neck, exposing the strange, red wirework that was the inside of her neck. 28

Thankfully, she stopped moving. It made it easier for him to stitch up what he had exposed. Maybe he had cut too much. Alfred doused the side of her neck with hydrogen peroxide. The burning odor that reached his nostrils told him that it was actually ammonia. Close enough.29

The piece of her skin that he had ‘flayed’ was then sewn by Alfred’s hand with white thread to the left side of her face. Due to the fact that the piece of skin was beginning to act like a soggy slice of pizza from the amount of ammonia (he could have sworn the bottle had said hydrogen peroxide) he poured, he had to re-sew the piece of skin onto her face several times.30

Eventually he resorted to the use of a hammer that had laid farthest away from his hands. He had small black nails. With concentration and sweat, he poked a nail into the side of her new skin graft. The hammer came down too hard. Her jaw snapped, or whatever bones were in the side of her face. Hammering in nails was basically obsolete; Cherry’s face had formed a canyon.31

Alfred made a mental note to pay more attention in his anatomy and physiology class. Then he ordered pizza because he was suddenly hungry.32

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By now, he assumed that Cherry was dead. Her eyes were of a funny color – mostly because he had realized that he had caused major damage. She was starting to bleed a lot more. Even her skin had taken on a paler color and sporting an icy exterior.34

Alfred thought of her as a broken piñata. Deciding that his experiment had been cut short, he took his hammer and began to hit specialized places in her body – every square each where bone lay underneath.35

Maybe he could recreate her jaw. Breaking the bones in the shin (or maybe the pelvis and the arm and the ribs) could help build her a new jaw. He smiled. Cherry Lane never looked so lovely, dripping with the sticky blood as if she were a strawberry sundae.36