His sideburns are uneven, or at least people keep telling him that. So today he finally checked in the mirror, using his index fingers to mark the staggered black scrapings; he measured evenness. They’re off, minutely, but noticeably so. He didn’t like that.
He began to think that there’s something eluding him here. This happens every time he shaves—and the darker part is that since he’s noticed this malformation, he’s made it a point to shave a fine line where the two strips can match, yet they persist in their resistance. The left caterpillar longer than the right, but both dark as the coal-singed whiskers of a three-legged cat.
He looked down to his left, then to his right. Something was bothering him, and above the house, up in the guest bathroom, without the stalking bodies below him; without them to bother him, then what? The florescent lighting? He looked down, in the mustard light his placid skin had tone. And his teeth, yellow, yellow, yellow. He hated the color, plucked petals of daisies were that color, held in softer hands; but luck was never his strong suit. Now’s he’s only got cigarettes for company.
Downstairs, maybe in the partly inundated basement, a mother, eyes sanguine from holding back tears too many times, sat with herself and a laundry basket. She could hear her son through the metallic vents above her head—she couldn’t even escape him at the deepest point of their three-story estate. Her husband was never home.
Upstairs, the boy, who thought himself a man, with sideburns and all, and cigarettes for company, looked down, to his left, then to his right. He thought himself the victim, yet again; and the glistening light of his razor blade, like a flash of fire, caught his eye and held it there. The jutting cutter stared at him from the inside of the bathroom drawer ajar. It winked, and flashed, and stared at him. He didn’t like that—he grabbed it by the throat; it stopped its capricious flirtations.
What design had it when it only cut him uneven, and left his sideburns lopsided as his mother’s breasts? His father was never home, and he thought himself the victim—his life as lopsided, his emotions unbalanced as his relentless sideburns. How would this boy achieve his equilibrium, when he himself inflicts the staggered scrapings so—a pale child criminal in boots too large for a victim.
The boy thought himself the victim, and his father was never home. So with his silver instrument he carved himself the real one, while carving out his delusional equilibrium (as precisely as unnoticeably so). That is, until people tell him that, in addition to his sideburns being uneven, they’ve got blood on them. |
