Flesh of Her Flesh

Sylvan didn't consider himself a ghoul, even if that was what they technically called his kind of work. He considered himself an ex-med student, for the most part, and an artist, at times. He offered a commodity (skin) and a talent (the cleanest scalpel-work a careful eye ever thought it saw). He made enough money to keep himself and her in their flat. He realized it wasn't a permanent arrangement, but it would do.

"Her" or "she" meant his mum. He stopped thinking of her as "Mom" or "mother" for now. It wasn't that he didn't love her, he had, it was just that she had contracted a severe form of narcovirus and simply wouldn't wake up, as far as anyone knew. No one ever did. He wasn't even sure there were trials, although at first, he sincerely looked for them. It was just that there were so many, many other New Plagues that fought for grant dollars. He got discouraged, and then got wrapped up in trying to kit out their place with proper equipment for her long-term care.

He was just over the line, what with his scholarship and her savings. And it wouldn't feel right, anyway, leaving her as a ward of the state, where anything might happen to her. Not after she worked so hard to get him into school with the burning faith that he could do something about the scary reality that was settling in.

She developed dropsy. It wasn't to be unexpected. He left her alone for great periods at a time while he still tried to pursue his studies. She. He was sure she wasn't uncomfortable, breathing normal, he fought to get Lasix to pump through her IV to work out the fluid and stabilize her blood pressure. But she just expanded on the bed. He moved her with difficulty as he regularly checked for atrophy or bedsores, flexing her legs for intervals in the hopes that she wouldn't curl into a grim fetal position. But she lay her damp form on the bed, straight, and with skin entirely smooth...

The kind of care he tried to provide between classes and tutoring was just the humane requirement she deserved, was all. The penalty for victim-dumping was high for people inclined to shorten their loved-one's lives, whether for compassion or financial reasons, probably because everyone was supposed to keep up hope. But he didn't even consider an alternative, even if it kept him trotting. He didn't really even have the cash to hire a migrant nurse under the table, anyway, not that he would entirely trust one. He heard things.

But that skin. So much of it.

The hot thing in underground surgery was taking care of herpes complex VI scarring. The lesions were often a hair larger than a loonie, and trying to patch the scarring meant grafts. Anti-rejection tech had come a long way, and he knew he could do that. He'd make some quick money, and she wouldn't even miss it.

She didn't miss anything--she missed everything, anymore.

He did it for a friend who was trying to get a job in finance. She didn't know where she got it, but it was an obvious part of her neck. Innocent enough--anyone could contract it, but in certain field it just wasn't done to go around looking like a plague-person. And legit doctors charged an arm and a leg and a firstborn child. And he had skin, from her. It was theft! His hair stood on his neck as if he expected his black operation to be immediately busted by the CDC ethics police, but it did not happen.

And in the end, he had five thousand dollars in his account he didn't have before, and paid the back rent, the electric, and got the landline switched back on.

The next time was a friend of a friend, an actor/model who needed his face, which was slowly getting wrecked. He kept that bankroll under her bed.

Then he did an ex-lover, who paid him 7 g's out of guilt and for discretion because she trusted him to not tell a soul, and really trusted him, and trusted him so much she threw him a tip. He really didn't feel so good about himself or her after that exchange, but her breast, under his knife, was made just as perfect as he once found it.

She slept through it all, as she would. He made sure she had pretty good medical-grade morphine. Her wound care was desperately attentive, but he wasn't sure anymore if his tenderness wasn't less because he respected her, and more, now, because she had become a commodity. He tried to tell himself this was for her, too, her medications, IV, catheters, and that anyway--he was doing his part against the plagues, wasn't he?

The money was real. There were too many unlicensed surgeons on the street anymore, anyway--need made a lot of requirements lax. With so much invested in formal training, he hated to give it up, but he was making real bank doing underground work.

And not all of them were about her--he didn't always have to graft. He was just a maestro of the micro incision. He turned plagued bodies into ones that looked so good. And he found connections for antivirals that kept them fresh, like they needed to be, until they needed his services again.

He was midway through a nice reworking of a trophy wife's yawning thigh gap, restoring the plumpness that her tissue should have, when he realized she (not the patient) had a sore. Not a bedsore.

He was screwed. He kept things pretty sterile, but he didn't really know what this would mean, now. Was he contaminating his patient with a new bug? Could he treat her for the lesions? Didn't this mean his op was shuttered, at least on the "commodity" side?

He completed that work and sent her on her way with a mild warning to pay attention to that new skin. Look for anything...different. He tried not to oversell his concern.  Just being a black market professional, over here. Not panicking because his supply was tainted.

He sat with her overnight, contemplating what to do. She was like a patchwork. He realized, sickeningly too late, that her entire body was evidence of what he'd done. And it was a large body of evidence.  He had about ten nervous breakdowns, took a smear, and drove out to a friend who did lab tests. He was being cool. Until he heard what it was--

Something fatal. He either killed his last patient, or, the evidence of what he did for the past several years to his own mother was about to come to light, or both, or he was going to have something happen.

Something.

He watched her sleep that last night. He wasn't not tending to her wound care. He just wasn't really. Flowers of purple and black spread around the scar tissue And then it struck him--lesions. Instead of scars. Covering up his imperfect crime of careful sutures with a perfect predation of careless infection. Disease, which he'd fought in his way, would be his ally.

They congratulated him on keeping her alive so long, and her so sick, when the ambulance finally took her away. They meant to be comforting. He was, after all, some kind of caretaker, right?

In the following morning, he took a girl to bed with skin so smooth, except just this little bit. And he did not care.