• She spends all her days in the attic, surrounded by the fitting dolls that her mother had left her, many of them fitted with the clay masques she crafted.
    It is a big day: A new masque is to be sculpted. It is of a man who said that he wanted to talk to her about something. He had told her that it was important, and she had told him to wait, because she had not yet decided.
    She stands there, imagining his face in the blank clay base, wielding her mothers sculpting knife in her hand.
    "He is to be ugly.", she finally decides. "Ugly and disgusting and insane as well, and he will want to rape me, because I am beautiful and not for him."
    The little crescent-shaped knife carves with trained precision, the ugliest, most deranged expression she has ever conceived,
    and in a home in another part of town, a man gives up a loud yell as he suddenly feels a searing pain running through his face, as from a sculpting knife.