by Joseph Harms.
Skeletal and ferrous beneath the snowcapped truncated mountain the empty watertower like some oblate quadrupedal dead eye above the cascading baytown howled and whistled from its scabrous perforations. Not far below it the church’s redbrick belltower. The foot of nightfallen snow had shelved from their casques, pattered in incessant scintillae from eaves, the morning too bright, too warm, near seventy, the great pines tiered up the foothills weddinggowned, the deciduous trees little more than wiry ideas whining under the weight of their snowy doppelgangers. And then at the top of bayborn Main’s eastern terminus, downtown’s terminus, the State Theatre’s marquee obscured by a wing of snow, snowbulbs perched on its limning lightbulbs, the building an apical impasse from which the town’s steep declension gained momentum until abrupt curtailment—the perennial boardwalkcarnival dinosauric beneath the snow. It was May and the sun from the purview of downtown would breach the mountain by 10am, the archipelago coinage about the offing, the happy ambiance of Friday. People had settled into work and the town, bar the ring of snowcrazed youngsters here and there, was quiet. Snowmen croppedup. Summered against the winter the lone pedestrian seemed superimposed. School would be out within the week.
Leaned adjacent to the daymark’s red and white helices infinityspun and humming outside the barbershop Kasey in rote greaserhabiliment dodged a sheet of roofslid snow, dropped his rollie in the sandbucket, removed his shades and to the tinkle of metal chimes entered—he’d never had his face shaved by another man, the height of luxury and manliness, he thought, and a great way to spend thirdperiod, his first two fingers testing a mostly glabrous cheek as the door closed behind him.
“Hi, Kase.”
“Hi, Early.” Kasey sat in the chrome and redvinyl chair.
Early clericalcollared and caped the boy, hands maculate tremulous strong. “Maintaining the duckbutt?”
In the mirror Kasey met the man’s eyes, hangdogged lugubrious shellacked, fulcra of his gerontic patchwork, keystones that belied an indefatigable blithe mien. “I am.”
“Used to be when these were in fashion I resented giving them. Something effete in all that grease and grooming.” Early lit a Pall Mall, dragged, glanced at the boy in the mirror, sidled the cig between butts in a tin ashtray where it’d burn itself out before being summoned. “Now, with more or less buzzcuts being the norm as usual, the fallback between fashions, I suppose, it makes me nostalgic, I suppose. Or maybe it’s just nice to have something like a challenge.”
“I was hoping to get a shave too. How much more is that?”
“A shave!” Early crackedup. “Sorry, Kase.” He dabbed each eye once with a flowered handkerchief. “For you, free.”
“I know I don’t have much. It’s more to build morale.”
Early began snipping. “Hot date coming up?”
“Na. Just trying to look alive.”
“Hey.” Early paused midsnip. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I’m graduating in a week. I don’t think they’re going to bust my chops for one more unexcused absence.”
“Hmm.” Early resumed. “What about that one you’re always with—the redhead?”
“You’re talking hotdate stuff?” Early made a noise. “Shelley’s my mainman and that’s that.”
Early raised a threadbare eyebrow. “And Sam?”
“Hey, Early, come on.” Both looked to the chiming entrance. “Well, speak of the devils.”
“Hey, punks.” Early nodded at them in the mirror, kept snipping. “When’re you going to let me have a go at all that hair, Sam? You know I’m five bucks cheaper than your southside butcher.”
“Eh…” Sam and Shelley sat in a churchpew beneath a rack of oakmounted coathooks. “To be honest, Early, I don’t know if I trust a white guy with my fade.”
“Hmm…Kasey trusts me.”
“Kasey has whiteguy hair though.”
“And…Shelley, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Need a trim?”
Shelley laughed. “My God, no!”
“A shave? This punk here’s about to have one.”
“Don’t get fresh. And shaving Kasey’s about as useful as shaving a peach.”
Out the frontwindows sunlit eavedrips fell at once mercurial and aureate, somnifacient, vested with the transmundane, as if of or signifying a truer reality such that the street beyond flatten pictorial, factitious, the barbershop atemporal, the movements of those within mythopoeic, extant yet caught in archetypal repetition and oneiric profundity, the snowcovered cars parked up and down the street voidbright and noumenal, the skimasked man barred by scintillant eavedrips before entering the barbershop not an incursion but a constant, obscene circumferential arachnid red hairs from maskhole limning vermiculate lips’ incantatory ‘What did you think was coming your way, Abraham?’ chiseled into the incruent whole, the mouth the words the gun and Sam’s death interchangeable, unsignified, the monadic fundament of all things a lightfused ichor careless holy and terribly reft of transpiration’s illusion.
*An excerpt from Joseph Harms’ new book Evil, which consists of four novels (Ades, Baal, Cant and Wyrd) written between 2007-2018.
https://expatpress.com/product/evil-joseph-harms/