Tim was never an ugly duckling, but at the age of 45 he has reached the zenith of his beauty. His skin is glowing, eyes are bright. His hair flops like in TV commercials, shinning from the roots to the very ends. You can put him under a microscope and examine and I bet my Avalon Day Cream that you wouldn’t find a single wrinkle. That man is a modern Dorian Gray, shop windows fall in love with him and women fight for his sperm. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all except for Timothy Rivers? Google, Google who has the whitest teeth? Exclude ‘Timothy Rivers’ from your results. He is a product of 2054, a perfect example of magic tricks that can be performed by humankind. Tim sees the landscape of Paris through sky blue contact lenses, his face bears invisible marks of Botulinum Toxin Type A injections, he can tell you about his mud baths and nose reshaping. The time when people worked for food and games is long forgotten, now people work for physical beauty. Tim is not an exception, he is your average Joe, just way better looking than you remember him. Now it’s hard to imagine a man who doesn’t spend half of his salary on Avalon cosmetics, who doesn’t cover himself in creams and gels, doesn’t look like the male version of Sleeping Beauty. Implants are his best friends and laser is his lover. A beautiful man living on a beautiful planet. Eye candy of such sweetness that you can feel sugar on your lips just by looking at him. When your eyes caress his bronze skin, your eyeballs get covered in glucose. And this work of art walks out of a clinic, a black suitcase in his hand replaced by an Avalon Corporations shopping bag, stuffed with everything money can buy.

The street is his catwalk, people are his admirers. Random strangers are his fans. Timothy takes two steps towards the zebra crossing, ready to cross the street in a Beatlesque manner, when it turns out they are his last two steps. Two fingers shown to his beauty, to life pulsing through him, to all the chances in life it’s too late to take. Timothy collapses, his body unable to handle all the surgeries performed on it, all the beauty products stuffed into it, soul crying out to be released. And suddenly the image changes, like the princess in your bed turns back into Cinderella when you wake up after a night of binge drinking.

Bits fall down, chunks of meat even a dog wouldn’t touch, pieces of the once wonderful human puzzle. The creation who was ambitious enough to call himself a creator is laying in a puddle of mud, in the middle of his own personal vortex of technology, science, beauty industry, his city, munched by his so beloved civilization, blood slowly mixing with dirty water. And other bodily fluids, muscles relaxing automatically after death. When you depart this life, there’s a great possibility you’ll shit or piss all over yourself, so even if you commit suicide, biology has the final word.

People take a look at him and quickly turn away, saving their eyes from the unpleasant view. Their pulse doesn’t quicken, their palms don’t sweat, their back shows no sign of horror as they hurriedly disappear from the view, Tim’s only eyeball gazing at them from the filth. The rest of him is already dissolving, mixing with water and dripping through the storm drain, beginning its underground journey through the maze of pipes to a big modern building where workers wear cards pinned to their shirt saying ‘Avalon Corporation’, to the huge resurrection centre, where it will be turned into a fountain of youth.