Kelly was on her way home from the surgeon. Her face was swollen, stomach sore, sitting in the backseat of a taxi cab. She felt that perfection was within her sight. All that was left was to make her diet more lax, lapse her exercise regime so nothing taxed and sleep just short of satisfaction.
Though she was in her early forties, she still had the ability for excitement and was chattering away, texting her friend about how appropriate her new look would be. Soon she would look normal.
The taxi driver appraised her in the central mirror. He had an itch for conversation. This was a man in his mid thirties and was new to the job remembering the times when he took cabs and how annoyed he would be when the driver spoke to him. He understood why they spoke now. It was simply too awkward to be in a car with someone and not speak to them. Besides, he saw her excitement and thought that she wouldn't mind expressing it.
'Do you know, I was there last week,' the driver told Kelly in a raised voice so she would be sure to hear and understand him.
'Sorry?' she exclaimed while quickly sending the text she had just written. 'What was that?'
In a lower, slightly mocking voice he repeated what he had said. She asked where, completely at a loss at what the driver meant. He said there, pointing backwards with his thumb like this would clarify matters - which it did.
'Oh you mean the clinic?'
Kelly could see the slightly yellowing smile that he gave her.
'Oh, I see !' she said laughing. 'Just like how it's supposed to be !'
'Yeah. I just started this new driving job, and I wanted to make people feel at ease, to show them that I was just like them, a living man, a man who lives and has lived.'
She looked closer at her driver and noted his thinning hair, the stubbles on his face and the little paunch that completed the look. She admired him and wondered if it was all genetic.
'You've got a wonderful balance,' Kelly observed wistfully. 'I only hope that I'll reach the same level some day. This was my first time and involved several procedures in different places. I think I'll reach seventy percent of normality with it. I tried waiting for nature to take its course but it was becoming unbearable. Everyone around me my age has a couple grey hairs, wrinkles but I can't even get dark circles.'
'What have you been doing? Extra sit ups?' the driver said with a cursory glance at her waist. The tone was almost critical.
Kelly squirmed with discomfort but then said defensively:
'I still have to airbrush my figure when I take a picture. Everyone says that I don't look like the pictures. Damn right I don't !'
The driver nodded in approval, but only out of politeness. Kelly had said it with such eagerness that it could only have been a lie. She looked exactly like her pictures.
'The last thing I want to be is looking 'good for my age.' You can see my dedication,' she pleaded tearfully. 'I've coloured my hair grey in certain places, but not too much. I don't want to look too old, god forbid! Just old enough. Before this procedure, I put make-up on just to make the circles under my eyes; enhancing the lines around my mouth to make them more pronounced, but only so they make me closer to my age, not above and never below. I've been trying to maintain the exact excess weight for my age range as well but it's so hard! I just have the worst genetics. My legs remain as supple as they did in my twenties and my breasts seemingly won't ever sag. I just can't lose my good looks and become normal! All I want is to look my age! I just couldn't take it anymore, so I booked myself in. My friend did the same and she came out perfectly average, like you.'
'Thank you,' the driver said, pleased at the denigration.
'If it costs me my life savings just to look like I'm ageing, so be it. I can't bear the thought of people thinking that I've had surgery to make myself look younger, different, better even. That's a charge I couldn't survive.'
Kelly leaned back after shivering at the thought and fell into a pleasant contentment. Her throbbing face reminded her that soon she would look perfectly like everyone else her own age.
'You know,' the driver began again, 'medical advances are coming thick and fast nowadays. They're creating pills that stimulate panic and worry, to ramp up stress levels.'
'Panic pills?' she asked musingly, creasing her face a little stronger than necessary. She wanted the grooves to etch themselves permanently; being forty after all, she needed a couple thinking lines on her white forehead to match her age. She was a thoughtful woman but it never showed, these signs of intelligent life.
'Yes, panic pills and maybe,' he added with a smile, 'worry creams. Stress is a great ageing device. Without it, you can't ever look the way you're supposed to. Decent, I mean, natural, normal. Do you have kids?'
'No,' Kelly answered sorrowfully. 'That's why I look so good for my age - too good even - because I don't have kids to stress me, physically or mentally, not even substitutes like self pity and bitterness was enough. I've had guys sucking my tits but they remain perked, refusing to sag like I guess kids exhort them to. Lord knows I've had guys sucking my tits, trying to make them sag, not even my face will sag, Lord knows and saw my bleeding nipples. He knows I wanted to have everything sag, according to my age! Maybe it's the milk rather than the sucking that drags them down.'
'You should have had kids,' the driver said reproachfully. 'You lose life when you give life.'
'My life has been too easy and vibrant; I never lost life.'
'Give life instead of saving life; you have to share life.'
'I hoarded too much life and now cannot spend life, how I loved life!'
'Lived life is the gradual taking of life, our own life.'
'How I wish my own life had been taken, that I was a murderer, a murderer of my own life.'
'Did you look bursting with life?'
'Like a permanent spring when I should have looked weary of life.'
The driver, facing forward, looked like he was being chased, entreated, by Kelly, so rapt was her attention on his averted face.
'We're fortunate to have cosmetics able to represent life as it ought to be.'
'And a beaten woman they have made of me with the marks of time on me. They did a great job in taking my life.'
'Yes,' the driver said, smiling his yellowing smile again, turning around to face her. 'They sure did.'
