Ryan Dull | 11
could be shipped with impunity. And so the man whose romantic ecstasy couldn’t quite mask the pain of a Jaw Refragmentation was forced to transfer to the hospital full time. Numerous escape attempts left the door padlocked and the windows barred, an obvious fire hazard that everyone was comfortable overlooking. The man lay awake and imagined himself in a slab of rock, slowly revealed by expert, pounding hands.
Recovery was a more interesting challenge. The man with the new hands spent grave hours working his methodical way through coloring books. Physical therapists and art professors bickered over how he should learn to stand. Safety was a concern, but if he learned bad habits now, he’d never be able to forget them. After long, noisy sessions in which clashing opinions taught him neither to hold himself with the casual strength of a Greek hero nor to avoid falling over, frustrated aides would wheel him back to his room, whispering conflicting advice into his ears. He was constantly distracted by the new shape of his nose.
By the time the man was sent home for the last weeks of recuperation, the woman was almost finished. Having smoothed everything else to a better-than-lifelike facsimile of heroic flesh, she had begun to work on the head. There was something primeval about the perfect body’s craggy, swollen face. The man whose consciousness was perpetually tossed and rocked by the sea of love and pain and drugs and sleepless anticipation to which he daily exposed himself wept and cracked his Junior Astronomer’s telescope over his knee, certain that she was moving too quickly now, that he would never catch her.
But what remained of the woman’s project was all fine work, performed with tools like dentist’s hooks. For quiet weeks, he polished his stance in front of a mirror while she scratched and scraped at a perfect nose. The man tried calling some of the woman’s favorite restaurants, but they all insisted upon cooking their meat and none would serve him steamed grass.
On the day when he finally saw the woman with the profile and the dimple and the talent and the radiant perfection put down her tools and stand back and swoon