STAGE ONE: Initially, the image is a reflection of basic reality.

In the Oxford dictionary, a "cure" is defined as something that treats the symptoms of a disease or condition. There’s a cure to everything if you look at it like this.

Of course, the idea of a cure—if we are thinking practically here—also assumes the presence of disease. It assumes that a current state of being, however undesirable, is a temporary condition. Phoebe knows better than anyone that this is not always true.

She has always been this way. Change pursues her like a parallel line, as close as two things can be without coming together. This quality alienates her from others—not that she cares. All that matters is that Victor will never leave her. He might be the only consistent factor in her life. Victor, her sweet, darling Victor; they get along well because he understands the unchangeable facts of the universe.

She is a brilliant scientist, a peerless star, and one day she will surely cure death. These are the facts of the universe. Here’s one more: she will never, ever change. Not for the world and certainly not for a man.

Victor knows these things and accepts them. Like grass bends to the howling breeze.

He never knew how to say no to her.

STAGE TWO: The image becomes a distortion of reality.

Phoebe’s laboratory sulks in the dark heart of the earth, beating dimly in a twisted spine of concrete and steel. In her cute little slice of the universe things are simple. The answers to all of life’s questions burst out of bodies and stain the sleeves of her coat. She seeks them out with a childlike delight, like digging for worms in her grandmother’s garden.

Could the modified specimen recover from fourth degree burns? Could it regrow amputated limbs like a salamander? Could it inhale lethal quantities of ammonia without suffocating?

The answer, she finds, is an unmistakable yes. Each response springs forth like water-turned-wine from the intestinal tract of her newest pet project.

Victor is a dreamy sight these days, the kind of dream that stands at the end of your bed, watching you with unblinking eyes. The shadows that gather at the hinges of his bone structure are sharp enough to draw blood. He has a face made for chiaroscuro, even before Phoebe took a scalpel to it. She loves him even more now, if such a thing is possible.

It could’ve gone badly, if she hadn’t been there. No other doctor could do what she had done for him. Her work had saved his life.

The tragedy is this: from a simple glance, you can’t really tell. Functionally, he is exactly how God made him, perhaps even less than that; his skin is a blank slate. No scars, no freckles, nothing to suggest that time had touched him. Only Phoebe can trace the contours of his body and remember each incision.

She remembers severing the left wrist exactly two centimeters below the socket; it grows back in minutes. The other arm takes considerably longer. Replicating this test six more times  yields the same results. What made one arm different from the other?

He flinches every time she does this and sometimes he even cries. Still, he never rejects her advances—she thinks he’s just happy to be alive again. He knows that it’s necessary to test the limits of his nascent body. And oh, how they’ve tested. He  recovers from just about anything. In her wildest dreams, she stuffs a bomb into his chest to see if his body would stitch itself back together again.

The cure to death is just life in an endless loop. She’s embarrassed she didn’t think of it sooner.

She hears Victor’s voice in her mind’s peripheral, telling her not to be so hard on herself. She’s far from perfect. Every passing year is another bleeding gouge upon her mind, upon her memory. Lately, she’s  been misplacing things. Reaching for the ice pick instead of the mallet. She thought she outgrew those kinds of amateur mistakes.

To compensate, she keeps meticulous records. Every experiment is documented, every second is accounted for. She takes good care of her camcorder, the sole witness to the last ten years of groundbreaking discoveries. It’s where she finds the video of herself from the night before.

It’s an odd feeling, for someone who doesn’t see herself in the mirror very much. She only ever catches a glimpse in the reflection of a glass beaker or the polished metal of a microscope—here, she’s warped beyond recognition.

In the eye of the viewfinder, her expression borders on manic. She looms over Victor's trembling form, bright eyes cradled by the pitch black lines beneath them. Parts of her slip in and out of focus. She seems to be missing something crucial. What follows is a moment of delicate reverie.

Death has created an entire tapestry of missed connections. The two of them must’ve slipped through the cracks.

Victor seems to be multiplying endlessly, creeping into infinity. The blur of the night vision turns two hands into five, flickering, as they pull apart Phoebe’s pale legs—centipedal joints that twist and snap to make room for their union. A third eye blinks softly at the camera hidden beneath the overhang of Victor’s jaw. When their mouths meet, there are millions of them, all with hundreds of teeth. Here is the repeated image of a lover destroyed.

Somewhere in that unfolding kaleidoscope, in a hall of broken mirrors, a single drop of blood runs down Victor’s lip.

Her patient zero, her magnum opus, her muse, is thrashing underneath like a fish caught in a net— an entire school of fish, in fact, trying to swim in every direction at once, squeezing their silvery bodies against the mesh. Phoebe is the sheer, razor-thin netting that closes around Victor’s throat—his heartbeat sings between her thumb and her ring finger. She could snuff it out like a candle.

She remembers every incision. Every incision. Even the invisible line along the curve of his neck, the way his spine had snapped under the weight of the saw. She could count vertebrates with her fingers and end up at that exact same spot; she’d find it like a light switch in a dark room. She even remembers how long it had taken for everything to grow back: two weeks, with the brain taking the longest. Six entire days to regrow a human brain from scratch. She recalls watching it pulse like a beating heart from the shattered bowl of his skull, wanting to leave some part of herself between the rosy folds. Even if it’s only fingerprints.

She remembers all this and yet, she doesn't remember that night.

Not that it matters. The evidence sits in her palm. There's only the matter of interpretation. In the video, it's not quite clear what they're doing. Whether Phoebe is trying to bring him closer or break his neck—her hand around his throat is tight enough for both.

STAGE THREE: The image calls into question what reality is and if it even

exists.

There’s a negative connotation to the word “disease” that’s always bothered her: defined as an abnormal condition that affects the human body. It implies, broadly, that everything should stay the same. Nice, neat, and normal.

To be unchanged is significantly worse. Like the frail, delicate moment you realize that someone has stopped moving, that their skin has grown cold. Anything is better than that.

Still, she might admit that this was more than she expected. Victor  grew six new limbs overnight. They’d been trapped under his clothes for hours, twisting and writhing like an orgy of snakes. And that’s without mentioning the eyes.

One of them watches her now, the one that sits perfectly centered on the nape of his neck. More accurately, it watches the needle in her hand. A noose of thread dangles from the end of it.

Discarded limbs drag themselves across the floor of her lab. If left unattended, they’ll begin to grow from the point of amputation—theoretically expanding into brand new bodies. The implications might’ve driven her wild a few weeks ago; she could have a dozen Victors if she wanted to.

Now, she really only wants one.

She tends to him daily, sometimes hourly. The growth does not ever stop. It responds to injuries that aren’t there, emerging from places they shouldn’t. A hand grasps desperately at hers from the crease between his legs. She used to prune her grandmother’s plants; doing this is not so different. Only, the plants didn’t tremble so much and they certainly didn’t cry.

Despite this, her mind remains unchanged. She’s not shallow enough to throw him away over something so trivial. He’s her pride and joy, no matter how many limbs he has.

Indeed, Victor represents a series of major breakthroughs in the field of biology. The flaw in her approach—her and the rest of the world’s, really—is her choice of words. To cure something is to restore it to its previous condition.

The moment his heart stops beating, Victor abandons all hope of normalcy; of being able to walk or talk or breathe the same way. It was Phoebe who clings uselessly to the idea of fixing him. No amount of medicine can restore Victor as she knew him.

STAGE FOUR: The image bears no relation to any reality whatsoever.

Victor has outgrown the cramped corridors of her laboratory. He is a thousand miles away from the man she knew. It would be kinder to put him down. He is always, always in pain.

In the Oxford English dictionary, a "cure" is defined as something that treats the symptoms of a disease or condition. It suggests that this condition is an abnormality and that all things must be restored to their original state. Phoebe knows better than anyone that this is not true.

Victor is above her, beneath her, all around her. His body is a swirling mass of arms and legs and eyes and teeth. When she reaches for him, a million fingers and even more mouths close around her outstretched hand. She can no longer tell where he ends and she begins.

She cannot cure whatever is wrong with him because nothing is wrong with him. By human standards, he is a monster—but why should she judge him by those standards anymore? It is not fair to either of them.

When she looks into Victor's eyes, all three hundred and twenty-nine of them, she sees him for what he is. What she has turned him into. Alarm bells, of which there are a basilica's worth, ring loudly in the back of her mind. Still, and even still, her heart remains unchanged.

The definition of a cure implies that growth is inherently wrong. It implies that humanity should remain exactly as it is until the end of time. Caged in by its own ideas.

Victor is the key to that particular cage. He slices the arterial wall between cure and condition as though it were a fishnet fence. He is everything, anything, and more.

She’s so proud of him. Her sweet, darling Victor. The only one who  understands the laws of the universe. The only one who ever understood her. His arms are spread wide, begging for embrace. He closes in around her like the night sky snuffing out a star. She’s starting to forget that there was ever more than one of them.

THE CURE TO REALITY

Athena Ballard

Athena Ballard is a young author who writes about death, possums, and the tension between violence and intimacy. From Landstuhl to Manila, Athena has lived in a variety of places, but spends most of her time in Belleville, IL. Her work has been described as both "carnal but sweet" and "if gore was coquette." Her first poetry collection, A Love That Lives Beneath The Skin, is currently available on Amazon.