New Dress

Sitting down to dinner, I decided that the afternoon bike ride was nice, perhaps even better than the morning rides I had been doing, and I considered switching to morning stretches more permanently. As I contemplated, the screen finished its flyby of the first clinic and I was once again seeing a prospective patient showing up to a consultation. She introduced herself and explained that she wanted a rhinoplasty to fix the asymmetry in her nose.

This time, I was able to watch right up until they led the patients into their respective surgeries and I muted it for the next couple minutes. Fortunately, the actual operations were only glossed over and the woman from before was leaving the recovery room when I put my empty plate aside and returned my attention to the TV. The show flashed forward several weeks to a checkup, where the doctor applauded his own work and assured her everything was healing perfectly. As the show ended with the rhinoplasty woman and two others, who had received liposuction and laser hair removal, smiling and enjoying the sun, the mild bout of envy I was feeling was interrupted by something unexpected—a new dress sliding through the hole in the wall and dropping onto the floor below, followed by a sheet of paper.

Clothing being returned from cleaning wasn’t unusual, though my captors always seemed to do it at night, while I was sleeping. But, a new dress and what I assumed to be a note had never arrived before.

Kneeling down, I wasn't able to see anything in the blackness of the wall slot, so I approached. Placing my ear against the wall, I heard the faint click of what I guessed was a distant door latching and then silence. Picking up the note, it simply contained two sentences, “Se requiere tu presencia. Prepárate mañana por la noche.” My Spanish was good enough to understand that something was happening and I'd be expected to attend tomorrow night.

I set the note aside, thinking that maybe I could use eyeliner pencil to write something, and picked up the dress. It was a familiar and iconic—or maybe cliché—white dress, clearly meant to evoke Marilyn Monroe, but with a much higher hem and more revealing bust than the original. I hung it up to prevent any wrinkles from forming overnight and returned to the couch to sit in anticipation.