SULFUR EDITIONS

Posters slapped onto city buses and benches show a steady hand gripping a gleaming scalpel. Bold lettering with a fuzzy shadow jumps out with the name SILAS CARVER, Plastic Surgeon to the Stars.

I am he.

Sans stars—unless you count the porn actress whose nipples I nudged a few centimeters north. Something about easier access.

 It was a Tuesday morning. I was shuffling papers on my desk because I didn’t have anything else to do. Business had been slow. Oh, people still wanted their breasts sculpted so they would gently sway upward toward the Crab Nebula. They still craved Botox injections, transforming themselves into blow-up dolls with attitudes. But divorce lawyers weren’t working pro bono, and neither was I.

I needed a real payday.

“Doctor?” came the craggy voice of my nurse over the crackling intercom. “I’ve got a walk-in here. No appointment.”

“Man or woman?”

“Does it matter?”

“My bank account says no.”

“I’ll send her in.”

 She was short. Blonde. Attractive. Fit. Around 25. Dressed in designer jeans and a silk blouse. Money!

Hmm. I didn’t peg her as rhinoplasty, lifting, or breast enhancement, but she did walk funny, as if her left earlobe pulled her into the room. Lovely earlobes, though. Not too pendulous.

I stood up to greet her. “Please have a seat, Ms…”

“YONDERBECKON.  EMILY YONDERBECKON. THANK YOU, DOCTOR.”

Holy mother of God! Why was she screaming?

We sat down. “I should say right off the bat, Ms. Yonderbeckon,  I can’t help you with hearing loss.”

“I didn’t come for that,” she whispered, perhaps overcompensating.

What’s wrong with this woman?

“Okay, so what can I do for you? There’s no obvious reason for your visit.” I gestured as I spoke, kept it clinical. “Symmetrical face, almond eyes, harmonious nasal alignment. Full breasts. Curvy but fit body. A swimsuit model if I’ve ever seen one.”

“I need a new set of ears,” she whispered, so softly I barely understood.

“Excuse me?”

“I want a new pair.”

“You want ear surgery? Why? They’re perfect!” I don’t know why I argued. I was in the red, but perhaps some vestige of professional responsibility remained. “Besides, as I implied, otoplasty is not going to help you with hearing loss.”

As I spoke, she leaned in closer and closer with her right ear cocked toward me, concentrating on my every word as if she were terrified she might miss something.

When I finished, she sat back. “I DON’T WANT OTOPLASTY. I WANT MORE EARS TO HEAR THE CHILDREN.”

“You mean more than two?”

“Yes. Two more. On the back of my head.”

“Huh?”

Now she looked around the room, aiming her ear like a gun toward the corners. “Rats? Do you have rats in here? I hear scuttering. In the walls. Oh, God! What if it’s not rats?”

“There are no rodents in here. Just you, me, and four perfectly placed sensory organs as God intended. You don’t need more ears, Ms. Yonderbeckon. What you need is an audiometric evaluation.”

And a licensed therapist.

She removed a fidget spinner from a pocket of her jeans and fussed with it, her head slightly spinning with the whirring sound of the toy.

“I HEAR EVERYTHING PERFECTLY,” she yelled into her lap, then adjusted her voice. “My hearing is excellent according to my ENT.”

“So why do you need two more ears?”

“Well, people have eyes in the back of their heads.”

“That’s a metaphor, Ms. Yonderbeckon. No one really has eyes in the back of their heads.”

“A SHAME,” she yelled. She spun the toy faster. “How many tragedies could we have diverted if only we had eyes and ears in the back of our heads?” she said, her voice tinged with despair.

 I’d just read an article on Cinderella surgery. Some Hollywood actress wanted her feet truncated to fit into designer shoes. Or what about tongue bifurcation for the satanists? Or dimpleplasty of the chin? I saw a future in what I could call ‘vestigial cosmetics,’ and perhaps publication in the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery journal. But mostly I saw green.

I cleared my throat. “I could do that for you, for the right price. Nevertheless, it would be purely cosmetic. You wouldn’t hear anything from the back of your head.”

She rose from her chair and leaned over the desk, her left ear mere inches from my lips. “Say that again.”

I repeated it.

She collapsed in her chair, disappointment tugging down the corners of her mouth.

Then she sat bolt upright. “Wait! Do you hear that?”

Silence ensued. I heard only my nurse yawning vocally in the outer office. “Hear what?”

“A baby crying.”

“I hear no baby crying.”

“LISTEN HARDER.”

For the sake of advancement in plastic surgery—and a hefty fee—I focused, despite my skepticism. I let a full minute pass before I said, “My nurse is groaning with boredom in the next room. That’s all.”

She rose from her chair and put her ear to a wall. “I hear it all the time now. The crying. Over everything else. A movie. The chatter in a supermarket. A poetry reading in a bookshop. The crying. Incessant. Desperate. A child in distress.”

Even I—a cynical, venal, and morally grubby surgeon—could not maintain my bedside smile. It collapsed.

“Please, Emily. Sit.”

Head down, fidget spinner hanging loosely in her hand, she took a seat again.

“What happened?”

Tears pooled in the delicate folds of her lower eyelids. She sniffled, wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I WAS JUST IN THE OTHER ROOM! One minute I heard her cooing, the next nothing. There was something in between. I DIDN’T HEAR IT. My back was to the sound at the time. She must have been crying. MUST HAVE NEEDED ME.”

She kneaded her forehead with her tense fingers. “If I’d had ears in the back of my head, I wouldn’t have missed it.”

The fidget spinner shuddered… and stopped.