Claire was thinking only of her wisdom teeth as she counted backward from ten and drifted off into anesthetic oblivion. She hadn’t had them out yet but if her friends were anything to go by then the money should be rolling in pretty soon after she recovered from the operation. Dental work was expensive.

Doctor Rose was paged while his nurse Michelle was finishing up giving him head from underneath his massive wood desk. He ignored the noise of his tabletop phone and gripped her blond hair by it’s dark black roots while he came. There were photos of post-op, cosmetic successes going by in a slide show on his desktop computer monitor, images he stared at until his eyes slammed shut.

Claire woke up from her surgery at one forty-five in the afternoon. She went into the bathroom and shrugged her nightgown down over her bulging new chest. After staring for a few minutes she returned to the recovery room and saw her bed neighbour, a middle-aged woman with severe burns scarring the right side of her face.