My New Head

CW: Gore

I spare no one the spectacle of looking at my “face” or the risk of losing their eyesight from the terror. If you’re really ugly, your grotesqueness can produce toxins with enough potency to melt off other people’s eyes. The transmission is silent, immediate, and indiscriminate.

My research is informal. It’s only what I’ve gathered from the pointing and staring and children screaming and cars crashing upon seeing me. Ugliness mercilessly vacuums the air out of any environment. It triggers people’s fight-or-flight, and assassinates the very notion of humanity– that it should even exist or be extended to something that doesn’t look traditionally human. Ugliness is a life-threatening danger, and I claim it wholeheartedly.

I only went out in bandages in the beginning. My skin had completely memorized the stiff, softly-grazing texture of the gauze obscuring it from the world. Wrap something up tightly enough and it can cease to exist. You can even pretend it was never there.

Prior to my mummification, I was a much more insidious kind of creature: a useless, fugly woman approaching retirement age.

I thought my life would end at 30. When it didn’t, I was signed up for an inevitable challenge.

You should ideally stop breathing if you’re over 30. If you can be prettily immortalized while still younger, even better. A tragic, martyred figure who never got to experience life is always more beautiful than a seasoned, old woman who’s lived. If you must age, it has to be done gracefully. People shouldn’t be able to look at you and immediately know that you can no longer bear children. The fact that you can’t is less important than looking like you still can.

Prepubescence and adolescence was the celebration; everything that came after was an inconvenient contrivance with no direct purpose. It was an awkward waste of everyone’s time. Letting life slowly poison me with age was offensive for other people who had to look at me and see it happening. Never having had children of my own meant I couldn’t garner the automatic respect of a woman wasted by life due to childrearing. None of the grace you would ascribe to a grandma who’s trying her best could be mine. I was a walking scoff, and no wonder.

I was never too gorgeous to begin with, but the proof of the years I’d lived was now stapled all over my face. Rough, brash, profound lines. That one crease across my brow bone from a lifetime of wearing glasses pressed right up my nasal bridge…I’d had it since I was 20; the smile lines that reminded my nieces and nephews of clowns; the crows’ feet and ankles and fingers that jutted out from either eye…

I gave in and did a little botox. One puncture here, another one there, and I could squint my eyes at my reflection and pretend like something looked drastically different. Then I started getting filler. I’d go back in for treatments and find it had migrated away from my lips. One gruesome month some of it had dribbled down closer to my chin. I also started going in to jab the wrinkles masquerading as sanskrit on my forehead, but I was distracted by the assemblage of biowaste in the office. Disposed bags of fat, old needles of age-defying sludge mixed with blood, near-empty containers of balms, agents, rejuvenators. You could build a new person with these pieces. I humored myself imagining combining all of these things together, like a fucked-up cake waiting to be baked.

I went in for a few more appointments, but mostly because I now felt addicted to the process. I liked having a routine. I was essentially done with the filler and went hard with the botox for my forehead, eyebrow wrinkles, around the eyes, and the smile lines. Forehead, eyebrow, eyes, smile.

Forehead, eyebrow, eyes, smile.

Forehead, eyebrow, eyes, smile.

I wanted to see how often I could go in before I actually started to look good. I wanted to keep pushing the limits, hoping to find something hidden at some hardly-traversed precipice.

Any attention I attracted in public was just negative in a new way. I had merely swapped one convention for another; instead of publicly pruning, I was now publicly trying to circumvent pruning.

At each appointment, I couldn’t help but glance at the biohazards watching me in the office. It was no different from what I imagined a room full of urns to feel like.

My doctor was trying to sell me on a face lift. And maybe I’d actually really prefer a lip flip. Had I yet considered lipo? I was in too deep and stopping then would have probably deflated the parts of me that were now too prodded and probed-at to survive fully on their own.

That night, I studied myself for a long time in the mirror. I was unrecognizable in an unremarkable way. I thought critically about what I was achieving, or attempting to achieve. I hadn’t delayed the aging process. I hadn’t defied it, or recovered the softness I once had in youth. I was reordering and resizing parts. Experimenting with elasticity just to have the dry, textured skin always obey its gravitational obligation.

Running a finger over my freshly-done brow lift, it dawned on me that I could probably never emulate the past. I could keep going in for treatments, but society would never elevate its image of me. I would just be the sorry old sow who was superfluously chasing after the elusive grains of a dream.

I realized, what I wanted wasn’t to be seen as young, or newly beautiful by proxy of appearing young. I wanted attention in a way that was new. I didn’t want to be relegated to a box, because none of the boxes available to me were good enough. They were all worn, like my skin.

I didn’t want to be the ugly respected granny, or the pitiable retiree who took vain trends too far and confused people with the new abstract geometry of her face. I could never be the older woman blessed with the enviable genes that saved her from being identified with her true age. I wanted a box that was all my own. I could stun in a way no one else had before. This birthed my plan: the ultimate beauty treatment.

I came into the office a week later as a follow-up for my brow lift. When the doctor was done checking me and left, I locked the door. I ransacked the room with everything within eyeshot: remnants of fat, disposable tools, disposed-of containers, new treatments in the refrigerator. I shoved it all into a backpack and rushed home.

I was excited to play doctor. Who’d have expected me to become a plastic surgeon after retirement?

I got all of my materials in order. I figured that sterilizing them would go against my greater aim. I retrieved a large Tupperware from the kitchen, and I dumped everything into it. I scraped cream and ointment into it; I squeezed old and new serum packets and syringes containing god-knows-what into my container. It started bubbling a little. Old botox bottles with droplets left, new botox, chemicals of things I couldn’t pronounce, old fat, and some pieces that looked like lacerated forehead- perhaps even mine. I mixed everything together.

I loaded up a new syringe with my concoction. I targeted my usual problem areas: forehead, eyebrow, eyes, smile. Forehead, eyebrow, eyes, smile. Forehead, eyebrow, eyes, smile. Forehead, forehead, forehead, forehead. Eyebrows, eyes, eyes, eyes, smile. Smile. Smile.

I wiped any blood and other leakage with a small, white towel. My flesh burned a hole through it.

I was done when the solution was done; I didn’t want to waste any product. Some of it stung, but I grew numb to the feeling quickly. It was like fireworks in my pores.

With botox I was always advised to avoid rubbing or making direct contact with the injection sites. Because this was something else entirely, I wanted to bandage every site for added caution. I also wanted the thrill of eventually unwrapping whatever was waiting for me underneath, so I wrapped my entire face in gauze.

I let my experiment quietly fester. I took painkillers until I got fully used to the sensations. Beauty is pain, after all. This was when I went out fully bandaged. My face would be a surprise for me and everyone in my path. I removed the gauze after two weeks, when it could no longer contain my face.

I very ceremoniously peeled it all off one evening at home. My forehead was swollen. Around my eyes was the pooling of three different colors: forest green, deep plum, and notes of navy blue. The skin around my smile lines looked decomposed and brittle, kind of like beef jerky. My cheeks had cracked a little, and I had an open wound at my brow ridge that let out steam. It looked acidic. I couldn’t feel parts of my face, but internally, I felt great. I was a mutant all of my own making, with a beauty treatment no one had ever tried before. I was rare.

I took my new head out on the town the next day, hoping I wouldn’t drip onto anything. You’d think I was on the set of a horror film. People would look at me and faint. Some murmured that I must be a zombie, and a lot of people ran the other way when they saw me coming. Those bold enough to get closer took pictures and videos. I’d never felt so unique, so sought-after, in my life.

My radioactive blend didn’t hold so well in my face, or what was left of it, for very long. Parts of my skin tissue dissolved, but I tried to bandage and stitch myself up alone. I ignored medical intervention for as long as possible. I wasn’t letting another doctor mold me again. Whatever narrative anyone could now associate my being with came entirely from me. My box was mine, and no one else’s. I was finally happy.