Needles & Sins Read Free Page A

Inside
     
    “There’s someone else hidden inside me,” the woman whispered. She seemed adamant. “She has been trapped inside me forever, and I want you to set her free.”
    I had heard it before. Sometimes, I felt like I’d heard it all before. Hidden within every big assed woman was a skinny beauty queen dying to be “set free” for her tempestuous moment on the runway of dreams. Or so they thought. As a surgeon, I have a firm and well-founded belief in the innate ugliness of some people. No amount of surgical intervention is going to change the summation of a gene cesspool. But still they came, false dreams in their rosy lenses and checkbooks in hand. They wanted their water balloon slack tits to defy natural law and stand up straight as B-52 bomber cones, or their cellulite-striped bellies not to stretch like beached and rotting whale blubber over their shiny, tight-cinched steel belts. They especially wanted to obliterate that saggy, baggy line that stretched from the pubis to the ribs and which rippled and shook every time they moved. No regimen of weight loss could completely erase the sagging quicksand slippage of skin that said “once there used to be a big vat of fat—or a parade of babies—that nested here.”
    The latest in a long line of women who wished that I worked in miracles and not scars sat in my examining room and pointed at the spiderweb of lines on her face, and then gave a general gesture to the rest of her flesh. It was not unattractive, but it was also not a look-twice-at-on-the-street body. An objective assessment said that she clearly wasn’t one of the genetic cesspool derelicts that was beyond salvaging. With a bit of cutting, stitching, nipping and tucking, I could set free the more beautiful woman that the years had walled up inside her.
    But there was a look in her eyes that I couldn’t place. I’m not sure how to describe it really. Desperation? Yearning? Obsession? It was the kind of overly intense look that, five years ago, would have made me send her packing without a second glance.
    Surgeons can’t take a chance on potential crazies. People think doctors make cartons of cash, and they do. But what people don’t know is that most docs have 10 years of student loans to pay off, and that as soon as you hang up your shingle, you’ve got to sign up for malpractice insurance—which instantly saps half your revenue. You operate on a couple nutjobs and get some outrageous lottery judgments against you from a bleeding heart liberal jury, and your malpractice insurance goes up and up; you might as well take up baggin’ groceries to earn a living.
    Which I was close to doing now. I speak here from the deep deep well of experience. Ironically, because of my desperate situation, I listened to the desperately strange woman longer than I would have not so long ago when things were better for me—back when the local newspapers used to write articles about my surgical prowess, not ineptitude.
    “I want you to cut me open,” she continued to explain. Her finger traced a line down the center of her forehead, across her nose and down in between her breasts. I noted, purely professionally, that she had no need of augmentation or reduction there…her chest looked provocatively obvious and well-rounded. No sags or deflated bags there. She was of a higher caliber than most of the patients I’d seen in the past two years. Not that there had been very many of any quality.
    “There is certainly cutting involved,” I said, ignoring her crude directions which basically would have had me cut her in half if I carried them out to the letter. “But what is it that you want to achieve?”
    She looked at me with the kind of seriousness that I imagined impassioned serial killers display as they approach their victims with single-minded purpose.
    “I want you to cut me from my forehead to my toes,” she said. “I want you to set her free.”
    I nodded and wrote something in her chart.