After four days without shaving, my face became obscured by shitty little face-pubes. The patchy chin-scarf had to go, so I pull out my electric trimmer and make the blades do their dance. Up the sideburns, around the adam’s apple, the insubstantial fluff cascades into the sink. It gets clogged in the drain catcher, though, so I have to reach my hand in there and get my fingers covered in congealed snot and hair.

I throw the clump in the trash. About a week later I put that trash my building’s can which then gets dumped in larger bin. A bird gets at the trash and pulls out my hair clump, picks it apart, seals the walls of a nest, hatches some babies with it, pushes the babies out and eventually dies.

With the bushy stuff gone it was time to scrape my face with a razor. Some of those stubby bristles get caught in the clump, most go down the drain. I scrape too close to a zit on my chin it pops prematurely, like amputating a limb I didn’t want in the first place so fuck it. But the pus and blood mixture spurts out and sticks to the mirror, so I have to use a washcloth to smear it off. I don’t get it all, though, so the chick who lived in this apartment after me looked at her reflection through a very thin layer of my zit blood, which was pretty insignificant compared to that bird’s experience, really.

I’ve pretty much finished shaving but I’m bleeding already so I pick at a few other blackheads and blemishes until I’m so thoroughly disgusted with myself I want to slit my own throat. So I stab the razor into the corner of my jaw (goddammit there’s a patch of hair I missed) and cut to the opposite ear, then over my cheek, the ridge of my brow, and back to the start. My skin starts to fall away and I have to hack at my nose to get it away from eyes so can watch my muscles spasm in the mirror. I throw the flesh that used to be my face in the trash, but the bird doesn’t get to that before some racoons do and we lose track of it from there.

I thought the muscle groups of my face would be interesting to look at, but mostly I’m staring at the cartilage in my nose as blood streams between my eyes and drips off the tip. Cartilage is pretty cool so I figure bone must be more interesting than muscle. The razor has a hell of a time scraping my jaw and cheeks clean but, hell, with a little effort I uncover the bones that really make up my face.

The washcloth sops up most of the blood and, sure, smears some pus onto my bones but still I look pretty good now. Bones are beautiful, even the ones that make up my face, and I want to display them on my shelf. First I have to figure out how I’m going to see if I remove the bones that make up my eye sockets. I figure I’ll leave the image in the mirror intact and see through those eyes, which feels weird because everything is backwards, though I supposed it’s the version other people must see. From this perspective I pluck my eyes from my skull and place them on the edge of the sink. I don’t notice that one rolls off and it gets lodged behind the sink so when the chick cleans the apartment she finds it and gasps but then gives it to her girlfriend for mother’s day.

With all of the muscle gone, my jaw pops right off and I dip it in wax and put it on my nightstand. I have to tear at my facial plate hard and bang my head on the wall until the seams joining my brows to my forehead give way and let me hold my face in my hands. Then I stare out of the mirror and look at what remains which, oddly, isn’t brains or anything. It’s hair. Not the hair on top of my head, that’s still there, but this is facial hair. Thick, tangled, bushy-lumberjack-wizard-santa-beard hair where my bones should be. And apparently that’s my face.

The razor is pretty dull by now so I give a once-over with the leather thing that makes razors sharper then dig into the knotted mess. It seems I have a lot of face to get through.