A Bad Day for Mercy by Sophie Littlefield Page B

God…”
    “They’re sterile,” Chip said hastily, “and they came here voluntarily. These are all voluntary donors, Stella, and it’s all very regulated.”
    “I, uhhh…” Stella swallowed hard, and then swallowed again, gripping Chip’s arm tightly to ward off the dead faint that was threatening to overcome her. He wrapped an arm around her, clucking softly to himself; perhaps he had a right to be a little peeved at her, since she had refused to listen to his warnings.
    The heads, which might well have been every bit as regulated as Chip said, ranged from an odd and not very lifelike shade of grayish-pale to various tints of unnatural brown—and they stared back at her with expressions that ranged from boredom to disappointment to, in one case, what appeared to be eager anticipation, as though the gentleman couldn’t wait to experience the procedure for which he’d been brought here. Any spine bones or nerve endings or blood vessels or what have you were tucked discreetly out of the way. Their hair was uniformly short, buzzed military style, leading Stella to suspect that they’d received a postmortem trim in preparation for their next adventure, one in which efficiency was valued over fashion. After all, when one was studying the finer points of face renovation, it was probably pretty important not to have hair hanging in front of one’s canvas, so to speak.
    “What are they about to do to these, anyway?”
    Chip went to the instructor desk in front and consulted a clipboard. “Blepharoplasty,” he said. “Eye lifts. ’Course, that’s just to start. After that they’ll be doing subperiosteal lifts. Those go pretty deep, so that’ll pretty much take care of this bunch.”
    “They do more than one … thing to them?”
    “Oh yeah, you don’t want to waste a chance like this. By the time they’re done, these heads will have had the works. Which is fine since they go from here to incineration.”
    Realization dawned on Stella. “These heads get incinerated?”
    “Well, yeah, I mean it’s sterile and you can’t beat it for mass reduction, plus there’s a shitload of regulation on infectious waste—”
    “No, what I mean is, if you’re the one who bags them up for transport to the crematorium or whatever … well, I suppose it woulda been easy as pie for you to grab you an ear offa one of them. What’d you do, wait until there was an ear that looked like yours, slice it off with a pocketknife?”
    Chip had the good grace to blush. “It wasn’t like that, Stella,” he said. “They were learning otoplasty—that’s ear pinning—and this one went kind of wrong. The kid went way too far with the cartilage scoring. That ear was barely attached by the time he was done. It wasn’t any big deal for me to take it the rest of the way off.”
    “Weren’t you worried that it wouldn’t match?”
    “An ear’s an ear, Stella, especially when it’s dried out some. Plus I pierced it and put my old earrings in, which wasn’t any big deal because Natalya’s been after me to get rid of them anyway. That’s all Dad and Gracellen noticed, I bet, was my earrings, especially since the tissues were probably starting to break down something serious by the time the box got there.”
    “I’da known,” Stella said, with conviction. “If it was my Noelle. I’d know her ear anywhere.”
    How many times had she touched her daughter’s ear, traced its shell-like edges with a fingertip, counting the freckles, wiping away baby shampoo, cleaning gently with a Q-tip? Dabbing the lobes with rubbing alcohol after taking Noelle to get them pierced on her twelfth birthday? Stella had held Noelle’s hand tightly in the little shop in the mall and squeezed her own eyes shut when the gal positioned the needle gun. She’d given Noelle her first pair of diamond earrings, tiny little sparklers for a high school graduation gift—she’d saved up the extra grocery money for over six months for those, and Noelle