The Perfect Woman

Vic pushed the needle into her flesh, pulled it out the other side and completed the final stitch.  His heart beat faster and tears welled up in his eyes as he stepped back to look at his creation. She wasn’t just beautiful, she was perfect.

She had the heart of his mother, well-muscled from performing a lifetime of uncompensated emotional labor.  She had the brain of his favorite childhood teacher. She led his slow, inexorable transformation into a scientist by presenting the world as a problem that he was tasked with solving.

Her breasts and buttocks were procured from the buxom bartender who would serve him whatever was requested and mop up any spills that occurred in the process. Her vulva, however,  came from the first girl that Vic ever had sex with, back when he was a junior in high school. It was Vulva Prime, the first one that he had ever experienced, and every one that he had come across subsequently had been held in comparison to it.  

Her legs came from his childhood babysiter.  She would get down on the ground and crawl around with him, but she would also stand in his way to keep him from hurting himself.  She made sure that he followed his parents’ rules even when they weren’t there. The perfect woman’s arms came from his grandmother, who had held him gently when he was an infant and with the combined strength of all of their ancestors when he was older.

Her hands came from his hairdresser, who would run them through his hair and touch his scalp as she gave him his monthly trim.  Her feet came from his favorite aunt who would let him stand on them as she taught him how to dance to the music coming from her wooden console stereo.

The crucial moment arrived. He would channel a gigawatt of unrequited dreams and wishful thinking through the lightning rod of his desires to bring this patchwork chimera to life.  The body jumped with the shock, but then lay still. There were no signs of life, but the parts had fused together into a new whole.

Vic recognized the body that lay there, flaccid and unable to love him, as his own.  Moved by what he saw, he embraced himself and salty tears cleared paths down his cheeks.

“I love you,” Vic said and his eyes opened before him.  He had given himself new life.