He went to school to be a barber, but he discovered that he only liked razors and the way they shaved clean lines with no wriggle room. His second customer was distraught both in and out of the mirror, but he stood firm, explaining that the lines were a map of her heart.
He went to school to be a barber, but he stood for too long behind a dummy with a revolving head of hair. The silence was too long and he did not have the skill of talking about nothing at all for hours on end. Instead, he stared into the mirror, saw nothing of the dummy’s soul, but some of his own. After that, he would not allow any of his classmates to practice on his hair. Instead, his head was shaved by his own razor held steady in his own hands as he reflected and deflected in mirror after mirror. In the end, he left the deepest secrets covered by a two inch curly thatch that ran from widow’s peak to nape.
He went to school to be a barber, but he found that there was too much of taking away and too little of adding to. He began saving bits of hair, created a suit of shorn secrets that armored him against the faces that gazed from mirror after mirror. As the suit grew, so did the chair’s emptiness, until the only face in the mirror was his own.
Katelyn Thomas is a writer, poet and photographer who works in the children’s department of her local library. She spends her free time hiking, reading and watching her rambunctious hens cavorting in the sunlight. She has most recently been published in Noble/Glass Quarterly, The Rush and Califragile.
244 words.