Free Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad by Kealan Patrick Burke, Charles Colyott, Bryan Hall, Shaun Jeffrey, Michael Bailey, Lisa Mannetti, Shaun Meeks, L.L. Soares, Christian A. Larsen Page A

head. They’d once been such a happy little family. Where had all that gone? “If you could do that, Lu, just until we’re back on our feet, it would be a godsend.”
    “Of course, Mom.”
    Lucinda’s father, a proud man, wasn’t happy about the idea of further financial assistance from his teenage daughter.
    They discovered him hanging in the basement the next morning.
    His life insurance policy and his will were in his shirt pocket.
    There was no note.
    Her mother was crushed into catatonia, so Lucinda made all the calls necessary, as well as the funeral arrangements. She opted for cremation, since it was much easier on the pocketbook, and skipped the casket in favor of a cheap pine box in which the Parker patriarch would be committed to the flames. The funeral director had looked askance, but Lucinda was past caring. Her father’s will had read: “To my dear wife goes seventy percent of my estate remaining after my funeral expenses and to my dear daughter, thirty percent in hopes that she will use it to further her education.” If it was to be thirty percent, then she wanted that figure to be as high as possible, and she wasn’t about to waste resources on incinerating a casket costing thousands of dollars. After all, funerals were nearly as expensive as cheek and chin implants, and there wouldn’t be funds enough for both.
     

     
    Her mother was never quite the same after they scattered her father’s ashes over Sunset Pond, where he liked to fish now and then. Since Lucinda had skipped the embalming, the urn, the burial plot, and the memorial service, disposing of her father’s body had cost a grand total of six hundred dollars—after the social security death benefit.  Though her mother would not have a burial plot to visit and adorn with flowers, she could always sit at the edge of the pond and put flowers into the water if she wanted to, couldn’t she? What was the difference?
    The following week, after the life insurance check was divvied up, her mother caught up on back bills and just managed to save the house from foreclosure.
    Lucinda made a surgery appointment.
    It was during her recovery at home that Mrs. Parker’s relic of an automobile, the one that should have been replaced years ago, finally gave out. The brakes failed, and in her panic, she lost control of the vehicle and hit a two-hundred-year-old maple tree head-on. She made it through with only a broken leg to show for it, but when they took her to the hospital for a CT scan, they found the cancer.
    It was everywhere.
    She had, at most, three months to live.
    When she gave Lucinda the news from her hospital bed, her beautiful daughter managed to summon up a tear or two, then rushed home and dug out her mother’s life insurance policy and will—which left everything to her.
    It was hard for Lucinda to be too upset with that kind of a windfall staring her in the face.
    She met with her mother’s doctor the next morning to discuss her mother’s illness and her final days. As the doctor was walking her out, he inquired about family medical history, since her mother was alternately too sick or too upset to discuss it.
    “Has anyone else in your family ever had cancer?” he asked.
    “Oh, sure. One of my uncles died of it a few years ago.”
    “A blood relation?”
    “Yes. My mother’s brother. Why?”
    “I’m concerned that you may have a predisposition for cancer.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “That because it runs in your family, you would be more likely to get it than someone whose family is clean of it. What sort of cancer did your uncle have?”
    “Colon cancer, I think.”
    “Then you should be sure to get a colonoscopy at least once every two years.
    Lucinda was alarmed. “And what kind of cancer does my mother have?”
    “Well, since it’s spread so far, it’s a little hard to say, but from what I’ve seen in the scan results, I’d guess it started somewhere in the reproductive tract.”
    “I had an aunt who