MicroHorror

Douglas Dean squatted on a curb outside a warehouse in South Central Los Angeles. The neighborhood is called South Los Angeles now, in an understandable attempt to distance the area from all the associations of crime and drugs which plagued it in the past. The problems are still here, of course. Taking something ugly and making it beautiful requires time.

That’s why Douglas is here, too. He needed to rent in a location where people were unlikely to ask questions and even less likely to provide answers if someone inquired.

Douglas pulled a lit Dunhill up to his mouth with his left hand. After reaching his lips it stopped smoking and the embers tripled in brightness. The cigarette had noticeably shrunk when he lowered it again. After looking at it he tossed the butt into the street and stood.

He walked to the side of the warehouse and glanced at a Lexus sedan backed up against the building. He always drove the Lexus here. It was a bit aged and less flashy than the car he drove to work. With a nod he turned the corner and stepped into the warehouse.

Inside, he walked to a coat stand and grabbed a surgical apron. After the apron was on he began methodically scrubbing his hands then covered them with gloves. He thought about work while doing this.

He thought of monotony as he continued to prepare. He thought of stuffing saline orbs into the open bloody cavities carved beneath the teen breasts of rich Malibu dilettantes. He thought of the middle-aged white men with Rolexes who paid for them. Some were rich daddies buying high school graduation presents for their little girls and others were rich daddies buying birthday presents for themselves.

Finished prepping, Douglas began walking into a larger room sectioned off with semi-opaque plastic tarps and thinking about how his golf friends would react if they ever knew of his moonlighting activities. He probably wouldn’t go to prison; some kind of mental rehabilitation center seemed more likely. People don’t understand beauty.

Coming to the last section of tarp he paused and pulled his mask on before entering. In the center of this brightly lit and sterile makeshift room was a woman. She was unconscious, unclothed aside from a pad draped across her chest, and fastened securely to an old steel gurney.

Douglas moved to her side and removed the surgical pad. Her ribs were exposed. Below her breasts her skin tapered off and seemed to bind with her exposed and dark red rib meat. In parts the white bone was barely visible. Scar tissue encircled these wounds on both of her sides and then joined the hardened tissue around her belly area.

This would never heal, not the way people thought of healing anyway. Dr. Douglas Dean had been working on this for Jane for almost nine months now. It was more beautiful to him than the removal of both ears of a man last year, or even the claw-like rendering brought to a middle-aged woman’s foot the year before. This was true beauty in surgery. This is the private vision of a beauty which is only conceived in the mind’s eye of the particular client.

This type of surgery in pursuit of perfection is unique. This is daring and about applying a degree of creativity to plastic surgery which the masses just cannot understand. This is about releasing the beauty within us all, or at least within those with the sense to seek out Dr. Dean’s special services.

He watched her chest flex with an inhale. The ribs pushed outward, stretching the scarred tissue and oozing droplets of blood. Parts of her rib cage darkened and others lightened with her blood flow. Her bones seemed to want to burst free. Underneath the surgical mask Dr. Dean grinned.

She would never wear a bikini again, not while society’s concept of perfection was so shallow, he thought.

Then the doctor resumed his work.