Rhinoplasty. Cheek implants. Ultra-sonic assisted liposuction. A purple exoskeleton was admitted to the clinic last week. His name is Robert and he’s the oldest twink in Cheshire. They washed his scars with white vinegar like a baffled messiah. You could hear him panting as they removed the stitching from his ocular socket. Like a fairy grandmother wrapped in bandages, we stood back and admired his Gertrude Jekyll mouth. He sits all day in the solarium reading a copy of Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for death.

The plastic surgeon here is known as the Master. We stand as smooth and still as chess pieces inside his Macclesfield mansion, our faces corrected with silicone. The grounds are guarded by three Dobermans. At night, their bodies reflect the moonlight like black mineral. Their names are Armand, Henri and Isaac. The Master throws them scraps of raw meat. The cook feeds them cows’ hearts slowly boiled in brine. The smell fills the entire lower floor of the house. After each liposuction, the dogs howl and paw at the door for the tangerine bags of fat, the insides of a cheap celebrity. We want to become as stone and blank as statues. At night, I sneak across to Robert’s bed. He reads me a line of Sylvia Plath: What would the dark do without fevers to eat?

Afternoon light coming in through the conservatory. I look at Grindr on my phone before getting a taxi to a nearby Travelodge in Nantwich. I only want proletarian cum. I feed on it like a bourgeois vampire. I need it to live. I pay the stranger to dress me up in a Victoria’s Secret baby-doll before sucking me off. Snorting line after line of cocaine off the dresser, he towers above me on the bed. In the dim lamplight, he looks exactly like the surgeon. I am trapped inside a castle that is a body. The Master takes a scalpel and draws the demented shape of his own dream into my quartered skull. At that moment, as the stranger fucks me, I have a sudden epiphany. I finally realise I want my entire jaw reshaped. I am like an equation, a sarcophagus sailing through the local shopping centre, Cleopatra reprogrammed. Vodka and tonic in the afternoon. Scotch and vodka at night. Smeared in mascara and sperm, I feed the fatty liver of Elizabeth Taylor to saltwater crocodiles, all my reptilian clones.

Tramadol. Zopiclone. Diazepam. We want to sleep for good inside an endless blue afternoon. Valium is our glorious cousin. We stuff our faces with handfuls of bitter pills. The surgeon here has an assistant, a pale anaesthetist that stalks the corridors of the clinic. She is like a Caspar David Friedrich poltergeist, a ghostly horse lost on a moor in Bavaria. She has no name. She eats a strict macrobiotic diet. She wears a black Chanel suit and shuffles from the kitchen to the bedded unit with her rubber hose and a silver cannister of poison. The phantom straps it to our nostrils and mouth before each procedure and only at the last moment, before we slip under the nitrogen, can you make out her ancient face lost in a blizzard of silver hair. Her currency is amnesia. A turkey vulture drenched in Mikimoto jewels. Rose quartz at daybreak. Obsidian at night.

The surgeon has made an incision along the left side of my stomach. The ancient Egyptians removed the internal organs of the dead because they saw the human corpse as simply ornamental. Skin stretched over a vase, a body like a necromancer danced in cheap costumes. I want my platypus mouth to swell into a new orifice. I demand lip fillers that evening. I want my lips riddled with the selfishness of bees. There’s a needle and a hook that goes in behind the eyes. In the solarium, Robert reads Emily Dickinson aloud through his bandaged face: One need not be a chamber—to be haunted— One need not be a House— The Brain—has Corridors surpassing Material Place— The Master shows me images on the screen of dental x-rays blasted through a titanium sheet clamped above my skull. He shows me a diagram of my intestines. My bowels are like an exquisite and crimson python that runs from my mouth all the way to Venus. I scroll through my iPhone at images of Naomi Campbell, Kim Kardashian, Charlotte Rampling staring back at the camera like a cold and implacable witch. To be beautiful is to become a satellite.

There’s a room in the clinic where I am stripped and humiliated. The Master is playing dominoes with his assistant, whilst the Dobermans sleep at their feet. There is a harmony to this cruel machine. A rejection of the rudimentary animal that is the human face. I want to be scrawled in red Yves Saint Laurent lipstick like a blitzkrieg. I want enemas of the purest filigree. Robert lies shivering in his bed. An infection has taken over since the last facelift. He sings to himself, possessed with the clarity of brain parasites. His eyelids are glued shut with saline and polylactic acid. The other patients sleepwalk from their beds beneath an orange hand descending from the ceiling. The month is December. Manchester lies like a frozen wasteland in the distance. Snow is falling on the glass roof of the clinic. I look out at the world from a distant and ceramic skull. I want to be Pinocchio reversed. Flesh becoming furniture. I am the miserable figure known as Antarctica. I am beyond grandeur.

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Beyond Grandeur was shortlisted for the 2025 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, judged by Henry Hoke, Mariana Enríquez, and Ottessa Moshfegh.

11 Stories, including Matthew’s story and the rest of the shortlist, is available now. More details here.

Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His published works include Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press, 2021); Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press, 2021); The Glass Abattoir (D.F.L. Lit, 2023); Songs of Xanthina (Broken Sleep Books, 2023); Psycho Viridian (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and So Tender a Killer (Filthy Loot, 2025). Instagram: @obscene_mirror