Wrinkles

The silent war commenced when the sun god Helios dropped his arm and salvo after salvo of deeply penetrating aging rays hit the unsuspecting girl as she lay on the beach. She was young, beautiful and stayed at the shore every weekend for many hours at a time. She didn't know; her friends told her she looked "healthy."

By the time she was twenty, her skin was ravaged. The weakened elastic bands below the surface of her face waived and surrendered like Iraqis to a drone. She started smoking-two to three packs per day, because all her friends were doing it. As she ignited each white canister, like a white phosphorous grenade exploding, posioned gas and tar wafted over her lips and face. She didn't know she should have been wearing a gas mask and MOPP suit for protection. A knight with the letters CO emblazoned on his chest cut off the blood supply to the understructure causing the lifeless tissue to rise up against the onslaught. Crows searching for food on the wasteland left their footprints. The air around her was pitch black and stank of death.

At forty, she looked sixty. She still didn't know.

At fifty, she and a girlfriend made a pilgrimage to a skin healer to buy a miraculous cream he had conjured. It gave no aid. Now, her cheeks were hollowed from relentlessly sucking the burning sticks.

As she was getting ready to go to a party, one of her front teeth fell out. This was a harbinger, as others would fall when the skin was laid open and debrided. Titanium posts held her new teeth like crosses held Spartacus and his soldiers.

At seventy, her son gave her a box of patches to fend off the craving for the chemical agent that held her prisoner. She never opened the box, because of the strangle hold the gas had on her. She deluded herself into believing that "everyone knows the patch causes heart attacks."

As she looked in the mirror, the wizened old woman saw deep vertical lines in her upper lip, grey skin and sunken eyes and then she knew.