Deadly

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the loveliest of them all?”

Not you. Not yet.

“You’re right. Not yet, but soon.”

Invidia stood in front of the full length mirror, twisting herself at different angles, and stared. She was beautiful, no one could deny that, but she wasn’t yet satisfied. She was close, though; a lot closer than she had been a couple of years ago. She had made sure of that. It had taken $800,000 and sixteen surgeries, but she was almost there. There was just one more left and she would be what she had always wanted to be: perfect.

Her hands traced over body as she recounted her past. She started at her narrow hips, a product of three sessions of liposuction, worked up to her too thin waist, no little thanks to the two ribs she had removed, past her shapely breasts, two expensive silicone implants, and rested on her predominant collarbone, she had suffered happily with bulimia since she was thirteen. She began to pinch the skin at her neck and smiled when she found her thin fingers unable to grasp at anything. She moved on to her face.

Leaning forward she closely examined her flawless skin. Using her fingers she stretched the skin across her cheeks in search of too large pores. Once confident that she hadn’t had any, she let her fingers poke at her plump red lips and pull at the corners of her feline-like eyes. Another satisfied smile stretched across her face. Invidia stood to the side and viewed her profile out of the corner of her eyes. The smile vanished. Marred Perfection. On top of her perfect delicate face sat a foreign nose. It was too big and too long and had an intolerable hump at the center. She couldn’t live the rest of her life like this. It had to be fixed; removed and replaced.

She rifled through her drawers in search of her check book. Quickly she flipped through the many used pages until she reached the last. Balance: $1027.00. That was barely enough to pay the month’s rent, which was due in two days, let alone enough to get rid of her repugnant nose. Moving to her desk, she flipped on the computer and sat at the soft chair in front of it. It whirred to life and seconds later she was searching for quotes.

Forty-two hundred dollars. That was what it would cost to fix the blasphemous nose that presided on her nearly flawless face. She’d have to give her old friend Lux a call.