Doctor Horror – Chapter 1: How to Debone a Chicken
St. Jude of the Scrapyard was not a building; it was a disease that refused to die. The hallway walls, coated in an institutional green paint that peeled in parched scales, seemed to sweat a mold no one bothered to scrub away—the maintenance budget having evaporated long before the foundation was even finished. The air there possessed a permanent flavor: industrial chlorine and burnt coffee, with a metallic aftertaste that never quite faded. I write this from the distance of years, now that the stench of cheap antiseptic no longer clings to my pores, but to my memory. I, Raúl, know that horror is not a shadow with claws; horror wears sky-blue silk scrubs and a perfume so expensive it induces vertigo.
I walked those corridors feeling the soles of my shoes adhere slightly to the aged linoleum—a rhythmic clicking that soundtracked every shift. I paused before the door to the surgical locker room. I knew that behind that door, the world operated by a different set of physics. Upon entering, the scent shifted violently. The odor of a public hospital was displaced by a slap of sandalwood and citrus. There he was. Dr. Victor “Horror” (an unfortunate surname he wore with practiced vanity) stood with his back to me, adjusting a cloth surgical cap with almost ritualistic delicacy. It was patterned with kittens playing with balls of yarn—a ridiculous contrast that no one dared acknowledge.
Victor did not turn around immediately. He was far too occupied with the glowing screen of his smartphone resting on a metal shelf. His fingers, long and manicured, danced across the glass. I caught a glimpse of Japanese candlestick charts—frenetic red and green spikes dictating his mood. He wasn’t reviewing the morning patient’s charts; he was monitoring his cryptocurrency portfolio with an intensity he never afforded human anatomy.
“Are you the new intern?” Victor asked, his eyes never straying from a red candle threatening to collapse on the screen.
“Raúl,” I replied, noticing my own voice sounded brittle in the hollow room.
Victor finally turned. His eyes were pale, glacial, and he carried his surname with the entitlement of a noble title. There was no hint of irony on his face when the name “Horror” crackled over the hospital intercom; he wore it with an aristocratic pride that strangled any mockery before it could form in a colleague’s throat.
“Fine, Raúl. Listen closely, for I do not repeat myself. Do not speak to me of ‘vocation.’ Do not speak of saving lives or those oaths recited at ceremonies just to make parents weep with pride. Vocation is for saints, for martyrs, and for those who don’t have a mortgage to pay. We are not here to perform miracles; we are here to be efficient.”
Victor slipped the phone into the pocket of his silk scrubs—a garment that shimmered with a softness that made my intern’s cotton feel like sandpaper. He moved toward the door but paused for a beat before exiting.
“Today we have an appendicitis. A procedure so mundane I am embarrassed to wash my hands for it. View it as an oil change for an old engine: it’s messy, it’s routine, and if we move quickly, we might catch a decent lunch before the market closes.”
We walked toward the pre-op bay. The patient, a man named Esteban, was the personification of invisibility. He lay on a gurney, shrouded in a paper gown three sizes too large, his skin a sallow yellow that blurred into the artificial overhead lighting. Esteban had the kind of face one forgets while looking at it, as if his very appendicitis were a breach of hospital etiquette. His eyes darted with anxiety, following a fly buzzing near a lamp, yet no one spoke a word to him.
Victor stopped at the foot of the bed. He didn’t offer a greeting. He simply snatched a metal clipboard from the rail and produced a stack of papers of intimidating thickness. There were at least four hundred pages, printed in a font so microscopic the lines appeared as mere black smudges.
“Esteban,” Victor said, dropping the stack onto the man’s inflamed abdomen, which elicited a dull groan. “I need your signature in the ‘Terms and Conditions’ section. It’s standard 21st-century protocol.”
Esteban stared at the papers in confusion. His fingers brushed the first page, which mentioned clauses regarding unsolicited hardware updates and biological latency periods.
“Doctor… I don’t understand…” Esteban whispered, his voice sounding as if it were being pulled from a dry well. “What is this about ‘updates’?”
“It’s simple,” Victor interrupted, handing him a silver pen. “Consider your body an operating system. Occasionally, to keep the metabolic software running, we must intervene in the hardware. You sign here to authorize us to manage any unforeseen system failures. It’s for your safety—or ours, whichever comes first.”
I watched as Esteban signed the spaces marked with red 'X’s. He read nothing. He signed because the fire in his right side had paralyzed his reason, and because Victor Horror projected a frozen authority that made questioning him feel like a fatal discourtesy. Once the red tape was severed, Victor snatched the papers and thrust them at me without looking.
“Take these to administration. If the patient later complains that he’s missing a kidney or that his heart rate features sponsored advertisements, tell them it’s on page three-hundred and forty-two.”
We entered the theater. I felt the drop in temperature—that dry, sterile chill designed to keep bacteria at bay. While the nurses prepped Esteban, who was already succumbing to the sedation, Victor approached a side table where he had propped up his iPad.
“Doctor, the instruments are ready,” I noted, feeling my hands begin to sweat beneath the latex.
“One second, Raúl. Don’t rush. Technique is paramount.”
Victor tapped the screen. The jaunty chime of a synthesizer filled the OR. I stood frozen as a YouTube tutorial appeared on the display. It wasn’t advanced anatomy; it was a cooking channel with millions of subscribers, explaining how to debone a chicken without tearing the skin.
“Look at that angle of incision,” Victor remarked, gesturing to the screen as the chef slid a blade through the bird’s tissue. “Pure poetry. Modern medicine has forgotten the aesthetics of flesh. We simply cut and sew like drunken tailors.”
I looked at Esteban, now deep in sleep, mouth agape under the glare of the surgical lights. The contrast between the human drama on the table and the poultry tutorial on the screen created a dissonance that turned my stomach. Victor approached the patient, scalpel in hand, but his eyes kept flickering from the iPad to Esteban’s abdomen.
“Let’s begin,” Victor said. “Raúl, hold the iPad a bit closer. I don’t want to miss the part where he explains how to keep the juices from escaping.”
The first incision was swift and precise, yet charged with an indifference I found more terrifying than any surgical error. As Victor delved into the adipose tissue, the video’s narrator explained the importance of ambient temperature in preventing muscle fiber contraction. Victor nodded, his hands moving in rhythm with the chef’s instructions. There was no tension in the room, only a thick, suffocating banality.
In a clumsy moment, as I tried to tilt the camera for a better view of the “chicken technique,” Victor’s smartwatch slipped from his sweaty wrist and tumbled directly into Esteban’s open abdominal cavity. There was a brief silence, broken only by the sound of oil sizzling in the YouTube video. I saw Victor look at the submerged watch, then at the forceps in his other hand, and finally, he fixed his eyes on me.
“Do you know the best thing about this name, Raúl?” he asked without looking up, as he began to stitch the incision closed with the watch and the forceps still inside. “No one expects me to be kind. The secret to happiness is lowering the expectations of others into the bedrock.”
Victor finished the sutures with mechanical perfection. He snapped his gloves off and tossed them into the biohazard bin with impeccable aim. He walked to his iPad and closed the app with a satisfied flick.
“Efficiency, Raúl. That is all that matters,” he said, heading for the exit. “Make sure Esteban wakes up before the anesthesia wears off. I have a meeting with a broker in twenty minutes.”
Victor left the theater without a backward glance, leaving me alone with the sleeping patient and the sudden, heavy silence of the room. I stood there, staring at the perfect seam on Esteban’s belly. I knew this was only the beginning—that St. Jude of the Scrapyard had just ushered in an era of absurd horror. Something had fractured in the logic of the world, and Dr. Victor Horror had just sewn the first stitch of a reality where a man could die simply because a smartwatch kept ticking in the wrong place…
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