1. Joan

Joan raised her head from the Times' Style section and stared with exasperated disbelief at the crimson puddle spreading across the table. Kendal had pried the lid from her sippy-cup. Results were typical. With infantile glee, Kendal laughed and shook the cup while her mother felt the creases deepen around her mouth. At this rate, the lines in Joan's face would have her looking like a marionette by the time her daughter was ready to drive, and after that would come a whole other set of frustrations. It hadn't always been this way. Before Kendal -- a time period which had become as much a matter of historical reference as "before electricity" -- Joan had considered herself free. A prison without doors, however, is still a prison if one does not leave, or so the logic went at the time. Proving that she was, in fact, free entailed quite a bit of dancing, drinking, and repeating; the friends and the nightspots varied over time, but the events were largely interchangeable. Things had turned from that to this in a fashion not unlike the way buildings collapse -- first a little, then the rest. Kendal's juice reached the corner of the paper. As it soaked through, the style page became semi-transparent. The makeup model's face became a palimpsest of words from page eight, her smoothness marred by a chaos of lines.