Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict by Thomas T. Thomas Page A

drink except by pouring liquid on the back of her tongue. She certainly couldn’t practice law if the jury thought she was trying out an unsuccessful ventriloquist’s act. She couldn’t be a mother if she was unable to sing lullabies to Alexander. She couldn’t be a lover if her kisses with John felt like two strips of cold liver.
    But she certainly had a beautiful, if immobile, face. As she stared into the mirror, the statue of Nefertiti—the frozen image with the vague, half-dreaming smile from the hologram Bellows had taken on her first visit—stared back at her. Yes, she had gotten a younger, smoother face. But oh, at what cost!
    “Shit!” That was the one word she could form without moving her lips.
    * * *
    John Praxis came home from the office a bit early, because he knew it was Antigone’s special day. He was glad and excited for her, almost as eager to see her new face as she was. Not that he had ever thought of Antigone as anything but beautiful. The minor lines and wrinkles she had acquired over the years were part of her life and her character. If it had been up to him, if she had asked him, he would have said the facial implant was totally unnecessary. But she never asked.
    Still, for days she had been cocooned, blind, and threading her way around the apartment like Ariadne tracing a maze. The experience had left them both wanting to get the wrappings off and see what she had bought.
    He opened the door and called out, “Antigone!”
    The place was quiet, drapes drawn, dark.
    He called to her again. “Hey, Tig?”
    “In here, Dad,” his daughter answered from the living room.
    He went in and found her alone. “Where’s Antigone?”
    “Do you want a drink?” Callie asked. “It’s been a long day. Mind if I have one?”
    “No, I don’t want a drink, and yes, suit yourself. Where’s my—” Girlfriend? Lover? Soul mate? In truth, he’d almost said wife. “—Antigone?”
    “She’s not here,” Callie replied, drawing three fingers of scotch in a tumbler from the sideboard. “She’s gone. I don’t think she’s coming back. Not for a while, anyway.”
    “Gone? Why, for heaven’s sake?”
    “Something to do with the implant. She’s beautiful, by the way. Young … radiant. But something went wrong with the nerves. Her face is … like a mask. Lips frozen in a ghastly smile. Cheeks and forehead as smooth and blank as plastic. Only the eyes move. And she speaks with something worse than a lisp. She slurs and dribbles and spits. … It’s terrible, really.”
    “Oh,” was all he could offer, trying to absorb what Callie was saying. “Oh!”
    But, after all, he reasoned, this was a disaster that affected just the body. It was among the things of the flesh. If John Praxis had learned anything over the last couple of years, it was the malleability of all flesh. What had been done in one test tube or bioreactor could easily be corrected and made whole in another. What mattered above any of that was the animating force, the spirit, the person. And Antigone was still alive, still inside the botched flesh—no matter what they had done to her face.
    “I still love her,” he said simply. “The face isn’t important.”
    “I understand, Dad. That’s what you think you feel. But would you have fallen for that woman if she had been ugly—or even plain?”
    “Yes,” he said stoutly. Still, he could see her point. It was Antigone’s face and bearing—her skin as much as her hauteur—that first drew his attention, even though at the time she was trying to take a big chunk out of his company with a lawsuit. But that was before he knew Antigone, the real Antigone, the person inside. And once he knew her, then the physical externals had come to matter less and less.
    “Antigone doesn’t see it that way,” Callie went on. “Most women wouldn’t. We have to spend so much time on our looks, on our makeup, clothes, exercise, and diet, that we sometimes—most of the time, maybe—perhaps