Learning to Shave
He sighed when he shaved and remembered how he’d learned to shave from the other boys, the wards of the state, because his one parent who was still alive was his father who didn’t love him, but who could’ve shown him— had he loved him—how to work the razor to avoid the nicks and cuts that often marred his smooth pubescent face. The white-fire septic sticks sting-pricked his face but salved the sores between the peach-fuzz. The boys laughed in the two-toned shower room when one drew blood, because it bound them in a fellowship and made the pain each boy bore more bearable because they bore the pain as brethren. His dad and Beth were high on meth and smoking on the floor. The social worker and the cops were pounding on the door. The little boy wept on the couch. His battered face was sore. The social worker took the boy out of the poisoned home. “Lee loves me like his mom!” cried Beth “I treat him like my own! You hear me, bitch?!”—And Lee’s dad laughed. Beth grabbed her greasy comb. Like a ballad’s hammer-falls it hit him when he pondered what he could recall of that night long ago—which is only “long ago” in a young man’s mind. And he found Beth once sitting on a concrete curb with a box of assorted stale donuts. “We were happy then,” she said. “But now he’s gone. He’s dead, too, you know?” Lee didn’t know; he didn’t care. But it was nice to hear Beth talk as if she cared for him, because no one else ever had. And she seemed to weep but he knew it was false. Then she crinkled the cellophaned packet of coffin-nails to signify she wanted more. But he didn’t have a lot of money himself, so he didn’t offer to help her. Then Beth grew confused and asked him who he was. That day he stopped shaving. He decided he’d become the father he never had. He’d raise a son, even if the boy was not his own, was adopted—or was a ward of the state as he had been. He would tell him that he knew what it meant not to be loved. Then he’d show the boy how not to cut himself shaving, and he’d teach him how to teach his own son how to become a loving father—a true role model— to instill hope in the heart of one who’d lost it between the black ravels of the night and airy phantoms of the day. Lee’s beard grew long as he dreamed of these things, of the father he had never known and of the father he himself would never be. And he woke at the ckink of the coin in the tin-cup by the cardboard sign that read: “I’d rather have a shave than the money.”
Pretty dark, dude. I liked it though. The stark realism hits you like a punch to the gut.
This one hurts. Very well written.