PAST/PRESENT: "Stash" continued . . .

“Daddy! Daddy! I need to go!” shouted Raine from behind the door.

The sprinkler hitting the glass grew louder and louder, drowning out the cries from his daughter as Roy stared with frog eyes at his divided self in the mirror. Half of his upper lip was now whiter than the rest of his body. Needle pricks of blood escaped the skin.

“Daddy! I really need to go bad!”

Roy knocked the can of shaving cream off the vanity as he frantically reached over the sink to break off a square of toilet paper from the roll, which he found empty as usual. His wife was a good decorator but not much of a housekeeper. Sweat rolled down the sides of his face.

“Daddy!”

He could not walk around with half a mustache. He had that big meeting today. Roy shook the shake out of his right hand that had done the deed and stripped away what was left of his mustache and rinsed the patch of fuzz from the blades. The hair vanished down the drain. Roy looked at the man in the mirror, a man he hadn’t seen in over thirteen years. His face appeared rounder, younger. He rinsed the blood off and inched the door open.

Raine’s dark hair, like his own, was tousled and tucked behind her newly pierced ears. She stood in her knee-length yellow nighty. Her legs were crossed as she cupped her crotch with her hands, trying to hold it in, but when she looked up at her father, her hands dropped to her sides, her lips trembled, and she began to cry.

“Raine, it’s Daddy,” Roy said, moving toward his daughter.

Raine stepped back; the floor creaked beneath her bare feet. Her body began to shake with her lips, and then she wet herself. The urine slid down her legs onto the hardwood floor. “You’re not my Daddy,” she whispered and ran down the hallway screaming for her mother.

Roy covered his naked mouth as though he had just exposed himself in front of his daughter.

(To be continued . . .)