After three days of work, the mask was done.

Eric held it up to where it shone, light glinting off of the chrome surface and reflecting his face, warped in his new disguise.

It was his twentieth.

He stood it up on the shelf next to all of the others. The variation between the expressions and overall looks of the faces wasn’t on purpose.

There were old faces, young faces, angry faces, happy faces; some were of steel, some of chrome, some of wood. They came in every color. He had made one last week with an iridescent black finish like a beetle’s back.

It used to happen every few months, but now it was almost every week that he felt the urge to make a new mask. He never wore them, of course. And he never showed them to anyone.

He turned off the light in the closet where he kept his masks, and the bright shine was dimmed to what light could escape around him as he shut the door.