U.S author Dianna Webb penned an edgy hot-ticket of a story – complete with a side-order of Hollywood glam – to take out equal second place in SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK’S short story competition.  

Here’s her story…

Dylan’s face had turned a pale shade of old sock. Packed in the very ice in which he died, he lay beneath my scalpel on the edge of nothingness…or perhaps eternity.

I watched my surgical team blowtorch the solid frost and cut away layers of shredded Moncler ski gear. Audible gasps orbited the operating room as the horrifying wreckage of his famously perfect body was revealed.

Dylan’s reckless stunt jump down a mountain at 60 m.p.h. ended in a canyon, his torso impaled upon a jagged stone with one saving grace – the custom-designed helmet kept his glorious visage eerily intact. His pacific blue eyes stared back at us as we gawked in awe.

He was the gold standard, sporting a heroic jaw and a tousled gilded lock over his mischievous brow. His sensual mouth proved just full enough to play the lover, the Greek God, the endearing outlaw.

Dylan’s iconic cockiness and tragic self-depreciation enthralled millions of fans over three decades. He had dodged bullets, survived shipwrecks, nuked Nazis, rallied an asylum, and aged backwards! 

Denied the luxury of onscreen death in 100 movies, The Studio weighed the risks. Unfortunately, Dylan’s contract forbade use of AI. His departure left five massive films in varying stages of production with millions on the line. His career had to continue.

Rusty Reid, Dylan’s longtime body double, had no clue he would now be playing his hero for the rest of his life. My scalpel balked at this daunting task. Why had I agreed to such an extremely risky procedure? Money. This endeavor would net a private island level payday, life-altering compensation no honest surgeon could accrue in a lifetime.

I’d subtly tucked Dylan’s fabulous face for over a decade. The Studio loved my work and today they definitely wanted me to get to it. A rap on glass from the observation balcony of the operating theater broke my guilty trance. I glanced up at the sinister ‘fixers’ hovering over their iPhones. I felt a distinctly threatening chill. 

I gave the nod.

Poor Rusty made his drugged entrance on a table pushed parallel to Dylan’s. Like sous-chefs, a second surgical team replicated my incisions of Dylan with precision on Rusty, gently detaching his face, delicately laying it on a sterile plate.

I lifted Dylan’s face from its corners. As if a rubber mask, I securely fit it on Rusty. After patting it down, I secured veins and nerves with wisps of a high-tech laser. The other general surgeons positioned the perimeter and ears. An ocular surgeon stepped in to finish the job. Lastly, ice packs were applied.

Under Rusty’s face, Dylan’s luminous pacific blue peepers, angelic and seductive, were forever lost. Dylan was now in the netherworld, void of his glorious past as a beautiful swaggering young actor of effortless charm, inexplicable luck, outsized worship, and dumbfounding wealth.

The God complex is a curse with room for only one Supreme Being. Imposters pay the ultimate price.

Next week…the bodies start stacking up higher than a New England leaf pile in equal-second place getter Tycho Dwelis’s tow-cable taut Western thriller –

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