Kelly Jones, the human Barbie doll, pursed her fat artificial lips, tossed her head of silky artificial hair, smiled a broad artificial smile, and laughed at the journalist’s question. She plucked a photograph of her old real nose out of the pile on the table in front of her and waved it in the journalist’s wrinkly quizzical face. It was a picture of a big nose, a long nose, a crooked nose. It was no longer the nose on her face. The nose on her face was the opposite of her old real nose in pretty much every way. The nose on her face was a small nose, a short nose, a straight nose. It was the Platonic idea of a nose, a prototype of the essence of nose-ness, the archetypical nose; it was a very fine nose, the perfect nose--so fine and perfect it did not look real. It looked more than real.

"We started with my nose," said Kelly Jones. When she talked, you couldn’t not watch her fat artificial lips as they moved.

"But you certainly didn’t stop there," said the journalist, twisting his own lips and quirking an eyebrow to indicate he was being amusing. It was his trademark look.

"No, we certainly didn’t," said Kelly Jones, laughing her throaty laugh. The journalist looked like he wanted to be made love to by Kelly Jones, or maybe he looked like he was afraid she would bite him. It was hard to tell.

The journalist turned to the camera and his face filled the screen as he explained that over the past ten years Kelly Jones had undergone hundreds of plastic surgeries in her quest to transform herself from a flawed, ordinary young woman into a perfect one. He twisted his lips and quirked his eyebrow as he explained that Kelly Jones’ model of perfection and beauty was the Barbie doll she had owned in childhood.

- - -

A dancing strawberry commercial for a feminine hygiene product came on, and Kelly Jones’ old real Nose, the one in the photograph, lay back on its thin motel-room pillow on its squeaky motel-room bed and stared in disbelief and anger at the stained motel-room ceiling. For the past ten years, the Nose had been living in this seedy motel-room, ever since it had woken up one morning in a pile of garbage, alone. Abandoned. And for all those years the Nose had been telling itself that its replacement couldn’t have been any more attractive than the Nose itself was, because Kelly Jones had such appallingly bad taste. The Nose had been comforting itself with the thought that Kelly Jones’ new nose would be an upturned stubby button of a nose, something that belonged on a baby or a Volkswagen buggy. But now the Nose was confronted with this impossibly perfect nose--and the impossible perfection of Kelly Jones’ new nose stung like wasabi. The Nose could hardly bear this. But when the commercial break ended, the Nose sat up to see what Kelly Jones and the journalist were doing now.

- - -

Kelly Jones was directing the journalist to open the freezer compartment of her sleek white refrigerator. The camera-man got a good clear shot of the inside. The freezer held two ice cube trays and dozens of plastic baggies, each containing frozen yellowy-grey and pink blobs the size of fists. "Liposuction of the hips and thighs, and a little from the knees and chin," Kelly Jones explained to the journalist. "Every couple of weeks I thaw some of that fat out and get Joel, my plastic surgeon, to pump it into my lips." Kelly Jones’ fat artificial lips filled the screen.

- - -

The Nose had been very close to those lips but they looked so different now it hardly recognized them. A commercial for a pill came on. Apparently this pill made you feel like a harmless white cloud floating in a vast blue sky, or else like a vast blue sky embracing a number of harmless white clouds. The Nose wished briefly to feel one of these ways.

- - -

The documentary was back. The camera cut to some gory footage of the liposuction and the lip-fattening procedure--both involved long, thick needles--and then back to Kelly Jones, who was now showing the journalist some before-and-after photographs of her breasts. In the before photograph her breasts were very small, and they had very large nipples. They looked like flaccid fried eggs, only beige and brown instead of white and yellow. In the after photograph, they stood at attention--round and hard and perfect. They were also completely nipple-less.

"You, uh, you," said the journalist, peering at the photograph as if he’d lost something in there.

"Yes," said Kelly Jones, the human Barbie doll, and she smiled her glossy artificial smile. A hard smile.

- - -

Overcome, the Nose filled up. It wondered where the nipples were. The Nose hadn’t known them well--they’d had little in common - but now... Were those poor discarded nipples sitting on some similar squeaky motel-room bed, watching this same documentary, experiencing similar sensations of shock and horror? The Nose hoped that the nipples were together. At least they would have each other.

- - -

Kelly Jones was telling the journalist something about the ancient Chinese practice of bound feet. "Most cultures have their own versions of the Cinderella story," said Kelly Jones, the human Barbie doll, "but folklorists believe the original may have come from China. Wealthy Chinese men actually made love to their wives’ lotus-blossom feet." Kelly Jones pulled her own feet out of the silver pumps she was wearing and took one of them in her two hands. She was very limber. The foot was tiny and toe-less, and extravagantly arched. "I got Joel to chops off the toes," she said, "Of course, he had to remove some of the bone as well and do a little sculpting, to achieve this effect." She bent the bottom half of her foot back and forth. It was very pliable--very supple. She could touch the top of her foot with the toe-less tip of it, and the bottom as well. The journalist had that look on his face again--not the trademark one, the other one. Of lust or fear. "I think the toes are somewhere in the freezer, too, way at the back," she said, "But I haven’t thought of a use for them yet."

- - -

The Nose stiffened. It felt betrayed. And worse--embarrassed, ashamed. The toes were in Kelly Jones’ freezer? Why hadn’t the Nose ended up in Kelly Jones’ freezer like the dismembered toes? During a commercial for shampoo that claimed to induce peach-scented orgasms, the Nose began to rock back and forth on the bed in despair, first gently, then increasingly violently. With each new movement, it rolled closer to the edge of the squeaky motel-room bed. It stopped, though, when the image of Kelly Jones came back on the screen.

- - -

Kelly Jones was being unusually coy. The journalist was asking her about uh ah about the rumors of female circumcision. "It’s not very fashionable right now," she replied, nodding. "Let’s just say I’m very tidy down there--tidier than any human you’ve ever seen--and leave it at that." She widened her impossibly wide eyes--her pupils were huge--and then she winked at the journalist. This seemed to satisfy him.

- - -

But the Nose was still thinking about the freezer, and the nipples. Were they in the freezer? The Nose waited to see if the cameraman would go back to the freezer. It needed to know what else was in the freezer. "Goddammit, go back to the freezer!" It hissed at the screen. But the documentary was nearly over.

- - -

"If you prick me, I do not bleed," Kelly Jones was saying. She lifted a Swiss army knife off the table and twisted the corkscrew tool free. She drilled the corkscrew into her own arm a couple of times to break the skin. It was true. She didn’t bleed. Instead, a small amount of a purple gel-like substance leaked out of the puncture, then congealed, fading to the pale peach color of Kelly Jones’ skin. She tucked the corkscrew back into the knife, scraped the bit of gel off the wound and rolled it into a tiny ball with two fingers. Then she smoothed it over the perfect elastic, artificial flesh of her arm until the tiny puncture disappeared. Her skin looked like new. Kelly Jones, the human Barbie doll, looked like new. She threw one of her artificial smiles right at the camera. The camera caught it and froze.

- - -

As the credits rolled over Kelly Jones’ paralyzed artificial smile, the despairing Nose, the too probable, imperfect Nose, began to rock back and forth on the bed again. It worked itself up into a frenzy of self-pity, of anger and frustration, rolling back and forth wildly and with great abandon--until it fell off the bed and dropped straight to the floor with a thwack. For the Nose, the distance was great. It felt broken. But the pain calmed it. Who was to say that the human Barbie doll, that the Kelly Jones on the television, was the Nose’s own Kelly Jones, the real Kelly Jones, anyway? After all, they looked nothing alike. The Nose lay there on the floor for awhile, first thinking of the old Kelly Jones and the disappointed way she used to look at herself, at it, in the bathroom mirror, her old real eyes soft and drooping and crinkled round the edges; then thinking of the way she’d sipped Jack Daniels with her old thin lips, tears dripping off the Nose--like caresses--into her glass. The Nose thought it would surely find a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels in the small motel-room fridge if it could only summon up the energy to get the damn thing open; then it thought of nothing at all really. Oh well, thought the Nose, dripping a little, oh well. It rolled stiffly, painfully, under the bed and, exhausted, fell asleep.