Everyone at the plant is pleased with how she looks. Exquisite, one intern admires. Well, I’ll be damned, says another.
Lucille wants to smile, but the engineers have screwed her jaw shut. Her face is now plated in metal, with splotches of gold where the uneven surfaces are patched together.
Her right hand is a claw. Her left hand, a magnet. Her knees no longer bend. Instead, they are sealed together and spray-painted gold to match her face.
Lucille wants to speak. She wants to say that she too thinks she is beautifully crafted. But just as the metal begins to creak near her jaw, the head engineer tightens another screw.
She looks at her reflection in her arm. There is only one rough spot on her forearm from before the engineers removed her tear ducts. She’s rusting the metal, one had said.
Lucille imagines a day when they will take off all of the metal and find something behind those perfected plates. But more often, she hopes they never do.
She reasons there is a fair chance they would find nothing whatsoever and she would surely disintegrate.
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