Charles kept moving the mirror up and down, looking alternately at his old, male head, those staples, ugly metal things that jabbed into him, and the pretty younger woman's body below those ghastly staples.

She hadn't had a chance, the sheet metal coming loose from the truck in front of her seeing to that. Almost her entire brain was removed in one violent act, and he was sickened by the carelessness of whoever was supposed to have secured that load. A woman was dead and he would have been as well if not for a radical surgery.

Now he couldn't stop looking at himself, contrasting his elderly head with the young femininity he saw below it. While he had never wanted this, he did realize that there were much worse fates. He had already seen one earlier that day. He knew which he would prefer to be.