Flawed to Perfection

Jim sat on a park bench and stared at the small stuffed animal. It had undoubtedly been given by a man to a woman. It would not be proper for a woman to present such a thing of sweet fluffiness. It was too cute. Men had to show they were sensitive. Women had to show they were powerful.

He had to admit, though, the thing was adorable. After risking a glance around the park, he stuffed the little creature into his pocket. It was a Pegasus, vibrant purple with two onyx-black eyes that seemed to beg him for attention.

“I saw that.”

Jim jumped at the voice, thinking he had been alone. A woman stood directly behind him. Her auburn hair fell around her shoulders in disgustingly gorgeous waves. The sun even had the audacity to peek out from behind the slow moving clouds to give her curls that special ‘glimmer and shine’. Her eyes were light brown, but had the unnaturally configured iris that was currently in societal favor. The woman was, as all women were, picture perfect. Her makeup was pristine, applied so precisely that it was almost impossible to tell she was wearing it. Clothing of expensive make and quality sheathed her from knee to neck. Her wardrobe left little to the imagination, but there were an assortment of secret items a woman could resort to to augment a man’s imagination. Or a woman’s, he considered.

Jim snapped his attention away when he realized he was staring. Allowing one’s gaze to linger was the height of bad form in polite company. What an odd combination, he thought, that men and women would spend such time and resource to achieve the appearance of physical perfection and become offended when they received the attention this warranted.

Who was he to judge, though? He was as physically perfect as she was. His hair was long, a dark sandy brown that accented the deep recess of his eyes. Those sockets were painted with makeup, as well, drawing the contours into a shallower, more pleasing visual. Only the color of his eyes were natural, a brilliant blue that he would not hide under the lies that the world demanded. His clothing wasn’t as expensively non-existent as hers, but did give him the appearance of slenderness and height. Platformed soles, clothing with vertical seam work and barely perceptible vertical color variation, combined with an uncomfortable device hidden under his shirt to straighten his posture, made him a man of bearing and discipline.

Without all of the ‘shine’ as named by envious teenagers, Jim was a man approaching the burn-out of middle age, spreading at the tum with a sad cast to his face.

Jim produced the Pegasus and held it aloft. “Couldn’t leave her there.” He said with a dazzling smile of painstakingly whitened and straightened teeth. “She would get lonely.” Unconsciously, Jim peppered the comment with the sensitivity of the emotive male. She responded to his words with a sickeningly perfect smile of her own. Not one tooth was misaligned. Her pink gums were vivid and healthy and her lips split and arced gorgeously to show him as much. He felt his bile rising. “Is she yours?”

The woman moved around the bench, out of his previous blind-spot, to sit beside him. Her arm extended down the wood of the backrest. She crossed her legs, right leg over left. Her skirt did not ride up a single inch. It would show exactly the amount of flesh it was designed to show and no more. “No, she is not.” With a curious quirk of the lips, she had stressed the toy’s gender, teasing him for having assigned it one. “I’m Jessica.”

He offered her his hand, palm up. Jessica placed hers palm down on his. “Jim.” His voice was deep and resonant, hers soft and husky.

Jim looked at her hand as it descended and felt an electric jolt of surprise. Her hand was beautifully manicured, with healthy nail beds and attentively maintained cuticles. The free edge of her index finger, though, was imperfect. Not broken off or jagged, but slightly flattened, the perfect curve of the nail interrupted with two slight angles bracketing a perfectly straight edge between. With round eyes, he pulled her hand up several inches and, uncaring of eyes watching on, studiously inspected the offending digit.

Certainly every woman carried a nail polisher. No one would dare step away from an office or traverse the perfectly manicured lawns of the city with such a blemish.

“And I will keep yours.” He said breathily, allowing his gaze to meet hers. She glanced to her hand and back up, her eyes filling with embarrassment. If she blushed under her porcelain façade, he could not see it. She stood abruptly and savagely jerked her hand away from his, bearing a countenance of such horrified humiliation that he almost laughed. She spun on her heel and quickly disappeared into an avenue swollen with afternoon travelers.

He stayed in the park for another hour, considering the encounter. He had never seen a woman so marred, would never expected such a thing in a moment of unwary leisure. He thought of her expression and was surprised to realize that the memory inspired an increase in the tempo of his pulse. He found no joy in Jessica’s properly horrified reaction. Jim did not care for the discomfort of others and pitied her greatly. His approach should have been subtle. Possibly, he should have offered a remark calculated to allow her the chance to discover the flaw on her own.

What he’d just done was the equivalent of public shaming and he was filled with sorrow on the revelation. Disgusted with himself, he made his way through the thinning crowd toward home.

The walk was only a few miles and Jim used the time to contemplate his sense of self-revulsion at his observation and the barbaric way he’d presented his discovery. He compared this to the wonder of seeing a flaw on such a flawless creature. He had not witnessed such a spectacle since before reaching the legal age of majority.

It had been disgusting in it’s way. Her fingernail had been abhorrent and flew in the face of the perfection humanity sought to attain. Everyone knew such perfection was a simple matter of evolution, but did not want to wait the time necessary for nature to bestow her gifts. Jim, Jessica, and every other member of their race used technology to bridge that gap. The economy flowed around this pillar of endeavour. Medication could be obtained for weight-control, complexion, halitosis, sweat, and excessive intelligence. New drugs appeared daily, each cited to end some horrible lament of the human condition, though the ceaseless advertisements were never so base as to clearly articulate the imperfections they were designed to remedy. If medicine did not prove enough, people would traverse the gamut of improvement from the use of maskable prosthetics to radical surgery.

Jim was repulsed by the entire charade, saddened at the loss of reality. On this thought, he arrived at his apartment building and came to a stop. He didn’t look around. Jim knew the grass between the building and the avenue would be exactly one inch thick and that every single blade would be the perfect slice of living emerald it was genetically engineered to be. He knew that every brick of the building in front of him would be perfectly sized, aligned and mortared. The navy-blue brickwork paint was molecularly bonded and would never fade or flake. The wood of the door, polished and clean, would reflect his image if he looked deep enough to see. Hinges would work without resistance or noise.

Suddenly, he felt sick. The world was perfect and he, a perfect thing within. No two people were alike. Every man and woman augmented themselves with drug or device, each attempting to present the perfect version of themselves. Jim was unique in his own perfection. He was unique in exactly the same way as every one he had ever met.

Similar thoughts had infiltrated his mind, before. Those thoughts were his constant companion, truth be told. His hair was almost raven black, his complexion pale with a tendency to turn ruddy with exertion or a change of climate. Off of his platforms, he stood an underwhelming five foot, eight inches and shorn of enhancements had a tendency to slouch and favor his right foot due to a disparity in the length of his legs. These blemishes were evil things and unsightly in the eye of man. Jim worked as a consultant for a cosmetics conglomerate and used his wages to right the stigma of his birth.

Jim lifted a hand and withdrew the Pegasus. He stared at the purple fur, squinting to make out grains of sand within. One of it’s onyx eyes bore a small scratch. The two white wings were bent at different angles from it’s time alone on the parkwalk, undoubtedly dropped by a careless master.

The thing stared at him through soulful black gemstones, it’s soiled pelt a testament to endured hardship, wings canted in an expression of beautiful, undeniable individuality.

It was small and beautiful and flawed, Jim thought, his heart yearning to express something his mind was refusing to admit.

The Pegasus was flawed, he thought, and perfect. How could such an innocent thing not be perfect?

He held the creature to his chest as the two words waged war in his mind. Flawed and perfect. Jim looked over his left shoulder, toward the park where he had sat and besmirched the lady, Jessica. Was it possible for Jessica to have other flaws? A ruined nail would not relegate her to the realm of fiendish nightmare, but what of her other attributes? Might she have hammer-toes? Might the natural color of her hair be of some unsavory hue or worse, lackluster? His heart pounded heavily in his chest as these thoughts infected his mind. His breath came in short pulls as he continued to stare toward the park that he could not see.

Could she be a mangle-footed ogre with acne and a penchant for unflattering jewelry? She could, he knew. Could she be all of those things and still be perfect?

The thought almost took his legs out from under him. With the Pegasus in a death-grip, wide eyes locked on the unseeable distance, Jim swayed, revelation crashing upon him like the great waves of the ocean in swell.

The foundation of his life seemed to shift. He felt reality begin to waver.

Why? The question rang out in his mind. Jim took a tentative step toward the door. If he didn’t get inside, he would fall down on the ground. It would be unseemly for a man of his age to be found in such a state. Why? He took another step, grasped the smooth brass handle and cranked it down, feeling the familiar shifting of levers behind the plate as the tongue gave way to the striker. Silently, grotesquely, the door swung smoothly open. Jim stared at the metalwork with contempt.

Why was a crooked tooth an imperfection if it drew attention to something as innocent and pure as a smile? Jim turned right and staggered, his breath ragged. He pushed a palm to the call-plate and twin doors slid aside to reveal the empty elevator car. When he pulled his arm back, sweat slicked the glass of the plate.

Why was sweat such a taboo thing? It had a function, did it not? It relieved the heat of the body. His back and chest began to prickle at the thought as if he had summoned forth the full production power of own body’s coolant system to prove the point. Jessica could sweat, too. That was simple physiology. Certainly there were procedures to weld shut the pores of such traitorous biology, but few people would endure such pain and expense. Jim pictured Jessica in his mind, the hair at the nape of her neck dark and clinging, a sheen of moisture on her brow, a reddening of heat beginning at her cheeks.

He bit down on his tongue to hold back an involuntary moan. His thoughts were wrong, his mind an agony of perversion.

Why? Why were these things wrong? He staggered out of the elevator, threw himself at the door to his apartments, wrenched the handle down and collapsed into the cool darkness of the entry hall. He shook with the violence of injustice he felt, with the misplaced sense of wrongness. He was wrapped in a shield of intoxicating depravity. Jim longed for truth and felt sullied for his need of it.

The Pegasus’ soft fur slid against his skin, the grainy sand of it’s journey scratching softly against his neck as he brought the thing up. When he inhaled, he could smell the green of the park, the clean sweat of his exertion, but lightly, under all of that, the chemical sterility of the factory that had produced it.

He held on to the creature as the anxiety attack climaxed and began to withdraw. This wasn’t the first, but it was certainly the most directed and vivid. His heart hammered so hard he felt it would shatter his ribs. Jim took great lungfuls of air into himself, savoring the repulsively wonderful imperfect scent of the stuffed animal. His mind began to quiet, his pulse to slow. Once the worst had passed, he began to weep. The attacks were furious, unpredictable, and violent. He wept from fear, but in equal measure: wonder. Perfection and precise beauty were the gray trappings of a lifeless world. During the attacks, though, his world was colored with vibrant imperfection and imprecision that gave birth to chaotic beauty. The two mental frames had a meeting point, a destructive overlay where one world met the other. As always, the disorderly vibrance of a flawed world showed the painted lie of his reality.

He stood when he felt he could do so, safely. The apartments were richly appointed with understated contrast, the dark hue of wall and ceiling against the light blues and grays of trim, accent lighting, and muted, metal-and-matte furnishing.

As a testament of his mind’s defiance, Jim drew a stool from under the island-bar of his kitchenette and placed it in the center of the entertainment room’s run of floor-to-ceiling windows. Upon this, almost reverentially, he placed the purple Pegasus. To complete the ensemble of revolution, Jim turned two lamps away from their broad-leafed ferns and onto the creature.

Certain that it would be the first thing he saw when he awoke, he kissed the tips of his first two right-hand fingers and touched them to the purple fur. The panic attacks were not new, but none had hit like the one this night. He would be reminded of it in the morning and perhaps, if he were fortunate, tomorrow would not be such a miserable tapestry of perfection.

With a wistful smile on his lips, he turned for the shower. Inside of an hour, clean and contemplative, he was asleep.