Gary A. Braunbeck - Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

Hey, babe, haven't I seen you somewhere before?

Why, yes, sexy, you do look sort of familiar.

Amanda closed the door, leaning her head against the frame. She gave up trying to invent a rational explanation because there wasn't one.

She went into the bathroom and washed her face. Looking up into the mirror, she stared at her new eyes. They were so perfect, so sparkling and bright, eyes that would cause anyone to stop and take notice, eyes that gave her face a luster it had never possessed before, eyes that would make people realize that maybe this particular package wasn't so plain, after all.

Then she remembered the woman's bloody face as it came through the window of the pub and at once cursed herself for being so narcissistic. She blinked, then took one last glance at herself—

—her nose.

Ohgod, her nose . It was different. Not so wide, so pug anymore; it was slender and perfectly angled, not rounded on the end but sharp like— —like—

—like Sandy Wilson's nose. Sandy, who was the receptionist at the office, who'd gone out with half the men working there, men who smiled at her every morning as they passed by her desk, and Amanda began to shake as she remembered this afternoon when she was leaving she'd looked at Sandy and thought: The reason her face looks so good, so delicate and chiseled and playful, is because of her nose, it's a really sexy nose, it accents her features without drawing attention to itself and makes her face seem all the more friendly and God, what I wouldn't give to have —

—she covered it with her hands, hands that seemed to be folded in prayer, or were clamping down to rip this thing off her face so she could stand here and watch her old one grow back, and for a moment the image struck her as funny but she didn't laugh—

—she whirled around and went out into the hall and yanked open the door of the linen closet, looking up at the jar—

—her old eyes had company.

Slamming the door, her heart triphammering against her ribs, she ran downstairs and grabbed her purse and dumped its contents onto the kitchen table, frantically sifting through the debris until she found her small phone number/address book, then quickly looked up Sandy's home phone number, grabbed the receiver off the wall, and dialed the number. A voice—not Sandy's—answered on the third ring. "H-HELLO?" Whoever it was sounded nervous and panicked, damn near hysterical. "Is...May I speak with Sandy, please?"

Amanda heard two other voices in the background, one of them Sandy's, the other an older man's, probably Sandy's father because she still lived with her parents, didn't she, she was only twenty and why in God's name was she wailing like that?

"There's b-b-been an accident," said Sandy's mother, her voice breaking. "Please call back tomorrow."

Click . Amanda pulled the receiver away from her ear, stared at it for a moment, then slowly started to hang up— —and saw her hands. Slender, with long, loving fingers; artist's fingers.

She remembered the woman who'd been sitting on a bench in the small park behind the Altman museum downtown a few days ago, sketching that incredible sculpture of those grieving women that was attracting so much attention lately. Several people had gathered to watch what this artist was doing. She'd been in her early thirties, with strawberry-blonde hair, lovely in a hardened, earthy way. Amanda had stood unnoticed among the admirers—mostly men—staring at first the woman s face, then her thick but not unattractive neck, and, finally, her hands.

Her strong yet supple, smooth hands....

Amanda fell against the kitchen table shuddering, the contents of her stomach churning, and tried very, very hard not to imagine what was—or rather, wasn't —dangling from the ends of that woman's arms right this second.

Back in the bathroom, she looked at her face again.

The lips this time, full and moist and red and alluring as hell.

Jesus Christ, whose lips are they?

Numbed, she checked the jar.

Getting pretty crowded in there.

She filled a portable cooler with ice and water and rubbing alcohol, pried the hands out of the jar and tossed them into the cooler; they hit the ice with a sickening, dead plop! and lay there like desiccated starfish.

She slammed closed the lid, then vomited.

Over the next two hours, it only got worse.

Her legs were next, model's legs, long and slender and shiny, with extraordinarily subtle muscle tone. Amanda wondered who she'd seen them on, and where, and what the woman must look like now.

Wondered, then wept.

As she did with everything else:

Breasts, full and firm, even perky, with tan aureoles so precisely rounded they seemed painted on, nipples so pink and pointy, and nowhere were there any blue veins visible on their surface, only a few clusters of strategically placed freckles that fanned outward from the center of her chest, creating teasing shadows of cleavage; then her hips were next, not the too-wide, too-sharp hips she'd been born with, not the hips that made it almost impossible for her to find blue jeans that fit comfortably, but hard, rounded hips, not wide at all but not too small, either, lovely hips, girlish hips, God-you-don't-look-your-age hips and a now-size-8 waist—

—the cooler filled up quickly and she had to go to the bathtub, adding water, ice, and alcohol to keep everything moist and sanitary—

—next was the stomach, not the slightly sagging thing she'd been carrying around for the last ten years but a deliciously flattened tummy, its taut, aerobicized, Twenty—Minute-Workout muscles forming a dramatically titillating diamond that actually undulated when she moved, a bikini stomach if ever there was one, abs of steel; then came her jaw, elegant and chiseled, the jaw of a princess, Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday ; her neck became slightly longer, thinner, sculpted, losing the threat of a double chin that had been hovering for the last couple of years, the muscles flowing down toward the sharp, perfect “V” in the center of her collarbone, something she'd always thought was unbearably sexy—

—the bathtub was quickly filling but that was all right, there couldn't be too much left at this point—

—then, after a while, her bone structure began to change: ribs not so thick, shoulders not so wide or bony, knees not so awkward and knobby—

—the rest of her body began altering itself with each new addition, her features and limbs molding themselves to each other like sculptor's clay, an organic symbiosis, her forced evolution, heading toward physical perfection until, at last, her skin itself blossomed unwrinkled and creamy, sealing around everything like a sheet of cellophane.

Amanda was sitting on her bed when she felt the last of it take place, then rose very slowly—the pain of each change had grown more and more intense, the last few minutes becoming almost unbearable—and looked at herself in the full-length mirror hanging on the inside of her closet door, not sure whether to smile or simply die. She had become both her own Galatea and Pygmalion. No other woman she'd ever met or seen could compare with what stared back at her from the mirror. She was completed, breathtaking, beautiful.

More than beautiful; she was Beauty.

And Beauty always has her way.

She told herself not to think about it, then went into the bathroom and pulled a bottle of prescription painkillers from the medicine chest, downing two of them before turning to face everything.

The remnants of Old Amanda.

There was arranging to be done.

By the time she finished there were four full Mason jars, as well as a full bathtub, sink, cooler, and toilet tank. The bones went into the laundry hamper along with several wet towels, and the skin, well-soaked, was draped over the shower curtain rod. She nodded, thinking to herself that it all looked very tidy, indeed.