My mother clucked her tongue when I had my neck stretched on my twentieth birthday. If she could have forbidden it, she would have. Not under my roof. Well, good thing I have my own place and my own money.
When I came for Sunday dinner after having my skin sandpapered until it was soft and nearly translucent, she didn’t say a word. Her eyes traced the newly visible lines of the blue-black veins that webbed my collarbone and she choked down her protein substrate in silence. By the time the meal was over, there was a muscle twitching beneath her eye.
I tried not to be offended that she flinched when I leaned in to kiss her cheek goodbye. What do old women know of fashion?
The limb extensions—arms and legs—were expensive. I had to save all my hard-earned credits for ages before I could get it done. Mom came to visit me in recovery with a disapproving scowl on her face. I told her she didn’t have to come, but she muttered something under her breath that sounded like a mother’s duty.
My head felt swimmy; the drugs were the good kind that made everything soft around the edges. Before I drifted off to sleep, I wondered when Mom had gotten so small. I wasn’t even standing up on my new, willow legs and I still seemed so much taller than her. Had she always been so tiny? And her hair. Hair itself was so old-fashioned. Everyone I knew had theirs lasered off. Mom’s looked frizzy, floofy, puffy, like acorn-colored moss. Giggles erupted from my mouth like a flock of bubbles at the thought.
Mom shh’ed me as my eyes fluttered. I was too fuzzy to tell if she was embarrassed by the fuss. Probably. She coughed delicately into an embroidered handkerchief. Bless you, I said and closed my eyes.
The drug hangover lasted for days and left me grumpy. Once the doc said I was fine, though, Mom went home. She didn’t get to see me stand up, all tall and lithe at twelve-feet-five and do a few agile pirouettes around the room. I’d paid for grace upgrades to accompany the limb extensions.
Best that she’d gone home, after all. She was dumpy and bumbling. No need to rub it in her face.
When I started talking about eye implants—replacing almond-shaped white and brown with marble-round all violet—Mom begged me not to get them. There are all sorts of fancy contact lenses you could wear. Why do something permanent? Again. She didn’t actually say ‘again’, but I heard it in her voice. She’s fluent in judgmental subtext. I just laughed. Contacts are for posers.
After I had them done, she stopped meeting my eyes.
Webbed fingers came next. For once, she didn’t comment; she just pointedly ignored them. They were super cute and useful, but whenever I tried showing them off, she changed the subject. She did buy me a pair of extra-room-between-the-fingers gloves for the Secular Longnight Season gift-giving holiday. For a minute, I thought she was making an effort. It made me want to hug her around the middle like I used to as a child. Until I tried the gloves on and she muttered, “Lovely, your hands look almost normal.”
Why didn’t she realize that her antiquated, unmodified body was the weird thing?
A few weeks later, I met an agent at a dance club. Have you ever done any modeling? I tittered and shook my head. Would you like to? He handed me a card and made me promise to call. Before he left, he grazed his knuckles across my face. I know a guy who can do something about those angular cheekbones.
The face flattening cost me nothing but a before-and-after photo shoot for the surgeon. No joke—if you go downtown, you’ll see me, fifty feet high on one of those holo billboards. The day the campaign launched, Mom sent me a text. “asdfghjkl 🤐🙀🧟”
I hurried over, certain she was having a stroke.
Mom? The house was quiet. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, swiping through 2D photos on her old-school tablet. Images of a round-faced little girl with wild curls filled the screen. She laughed, mouth stretched in a wide, toothy smile.
Mom rarely smiled like that anymore, but I still recognized those crooked front teeth she’d never bothered to get fixed. Funny, in a world where anyone can buy a designer face, she still looked exactly the same.
“Feeling nostalgic?” I asked.
She didn’t look up, just touched the picture of her younger self on the cheek with trembling fingers. You were such an adorable little girl.
Me? No, it wasn’t me. That was clearly a picture of Mom. I leaned closer. Squinted my bespoke, ten-thousand-credit eyes. It couldn’t be. But I remembered those clunky, uncool sneakers and the baggy sweater.
“Holy shit.”
I expected her to chastise me for swearing. Instead, she turned and took in my latest upgrade, tears in her boring brown eyes. For the first time, I realized it wasn’t the mods Mom hated. Not really. It was that I’d erased every trace of her in me.