Her reflection had always fascinated her. She would wake in the morning and spend hours studying her face and applying make-up to disguise the wrinkles which increasingly spidered their way across her sensitive skin. Her husband was unaware of her growing obsession with her facial features. Their children had moved out and, in the void of her emptiness, her own reflection began receiving more and more of her attention, care, and - eventually - love and adoration.
One day her husband returned home to discover that she no longer had a face. Her hair encircled a blank, flat, formless piece of skin tightly stretched between her hairline, ears and chin. She died shortly afterwards because, in the absence of nose and mouth, she was unable to breathe.
The soundless screams of her death-struggle would remain etched in his memory for the rest of his life. Together with the image of her desperate end he carried with him the memory of her facial features. Should he forget, all he had to do was look in the mirror: ever afterwards her face remained there, contorted with a terrifying anguish that wrinkled deeper and deeper into her ageing flesh.