The Face

The face lay on the table as I examined it. I wasn't quite sure what had happened as I had never seen anything like it. Slowly I walked around it, careful not to touch it. There was something about it that instilled fear in me. I was sure of what it was but this fear was rooted at the most fundamental level. For the time being I tried to repress the fear and deal with the immediate problem of figuring out what had happened to the face in front of me. 

​Someone had taken the time to tear it apart piece by piece and toss the various facial features in a pile on the table in my house. Was it a warning from someone trying to make a statement that this was going to happen to me? I was reasonably sure that I had not been the one who tore apart the face and dumped on my kitchen table. Someone must have broken in while I was sleeping because it wasn't here when I got home from work. I wondered if they were still in the house and why they would have left this face for me to see. That's when I realized that the face had to be of someone I knew and the only way to figure out who it was would be to put it back together.

I pulled up a chair, slipped on some rubber gloves and set to work to reassemble the face of a person unknown. I didn't know where to start, so I grabbed the nose. Something told me when I was finished it was going to be someone I knew. 

Upon closer inspection it was evident that someone had really taking their time to carve up and dismember the face. I looked at the nose and noticed that it had been carved crudely with some type of jagged instrument, likely a rough saw. I put the nose piece down on one part of the table while I slowly worked my through the other facial features. I started to assemble groups of related parts, putting the eyes in one group, nose parts in another and the ears in another and so on. 

After nearly five hours of categorizing the facial features and the rest of the head I had come to the conclusion that the head was a male. The features were just too masculine and rugged to be that of a woman. But still I would not be one hundred percent sure until the face was complete. 

I sat back and looked at the groups I had made and procrastinated about which way was best to proceed in the reassembly. There was no way I could put it back together in a manner that would constitute it becoming three dimensional object because I had no way of holding it all together. I would simply lay it out on the table as best as I could and try to make an identification.

Three hours later it was complete. The face was that of the notorious London serial killer, Jack the Ripper. 

I glued the finished puzzle into a frame and hung in on the wall...