PAST/PRESENT: "Stash" a short story I began in 08.

Roy pushed back his shower-soaked black hair from his lined forehead, revealing his 29 year old receding hairline to the florescent lit bathroom mirror. Wrap in his daughter’s pink princess towel, the only one left, sweat bled down his spine and chest. A purple candle, lit by his wife, flickered on the toilet seat’s back and sent a stream of lilacs upward. He had reminded her time and time again to not light candles in the house, but she did anyway. “They top off our décor,” she had told him. Décor? Some idea she had picked up from shopping at Pier One too often, turning our home into a catalog.

Roy examined himself in the glass. As long as he kept the front long, his wife wouldn’t even notice that he was going baled. She always joked that she hadn’t married him for his looks, but someday he would have a island on top his head like his father—a moat of scalp, surrounding a patch of hair.

But, for now, his facial hair made up for what he lacked on top. He combed the broad patch of coarse hair that grew over his upper lip and reach the corners of his mouth with one of six black palm-size plastic combs in the drawer. Julie, his oldest daughter’s collection. Each comb was given to her by the photographer’s assistant on school picture day, so each child could fixed themselves up, especially the ones who had forgotten that it was picture day. Julie never forgot picture day; she was like her mother—always unruly beautiful. Long red hair, the greenest eyes, and patches of freckles sprinkled over their defined cheekbones made them identical.

Roy took his razor from the yellow cracked ceramic toothbrush holder. Wrapped in between its three silver blades were orange curly hairs—his wife’s. He began pulling out the hairs one by one but then gave up because their slinkiness slipped through his finger tips. The blue strip above the first blade had worn away down to the bone, and the handle was covered in a pink film from her shaving cream. She never tried to be subtle about using his razor, but she never admitted she used it, which she couldn’t because he never asked her. He liked that she used his things, for it made him feel there, which he wasn’t too often after receiving a promotion three months ago.

Roy retrieved another blade from the pack that sat next to his wife’s pack of Lady Shicks in the medicine cabinet—the same pack that had been there for years. He rewrapped the towel about his waist and snapped on a new set of blades. He wiped the reappearing sweat from the mirror with forearm just as the sprinklers went off outside and sent a stream of water banging across the bathroom window every sixteen seconds when the spout rotated. Oshkosh was on a strict ordinance for water conservation since rain had been scarce for the past six months, but that didn’t stop his wife. The lawn had to match their house. Roy lathered his face in his wife’s shaving cream; his was empty. Cherries flavored his pores from his sideburns to the dip in his chin. With short strokes, he brushed the razor over his cheeks, leaving a ring around his mustache for last. His daughters adored his mustache; they would call him Mario from the Nintendo game as thick as it was, and his wife would always rub her nose into the bristles after they made love. Roy couldn’t even remember what he looked like without the mustache. He’d let the strip grow once he was accepted into the university. He wanted to look older. Now, the mustached, much like his name, was part of him.

Roy trimmed the mustache with the black comb underneath, making sure he didn’t take too much off. He steadied himself, placing his left hand on the vanity, and began shaving around his mustache with his face just inches from the mirror. As he was finishing, fits pounded on the door and made him jump. His hand slipped and the blades took off the left side of his mustache.

(To be continued . . .)