The person in the mirror imitated his every move. Up and down. Back and forth. Now in small circles. A tiny lather of foam leaked out of the corner of his mouth and dripped into the sink below.
“Tu miniffs on effery toof. ‘At’s wuh da dentif seffs.”
He knew it was time to stop when his mouth filled so full of goo that he couldn’t talk. The liquidy toothpaste clung to his lips and hung down as a long, stringy, slimy, white-green drool. He opened his mouth and let out a low, extended groan.
“Uhhhhhh. Mmmmuuugggghhh.”
“What are you doing?” his wife asked.
“I’m a zombie. Can’t you see?”
Mary McWilliams rolled her eyes and picked up the straightening iron. Her thick, brown hair had mounted a counterattack, and she was doing her best to burn it into submission. Manny finished rinsing out his mouth and picked up the same razor he had used for the last nine months.
“Can I borrow that when you’re done?” Mary asked without looking to see that he had already finished.
“I don’t really want to,” Manny complained. “Every time you use it, you leave your little prickly ones in the blades that I can never get out, and I have to get a new razor. This one’s been good to me, and I wanna keep it a while longer.”
“What’s this one’s name again?”
“Flint Smoothworks.” Manny named all of his razors. Manny named just about everything. Except for the dog. He just called it, ‘the dog.’
“Bumpy’s back,” he said.
“Where?”
“Where he always is. Although, I think I sliced him off.”
Mary looked at the rivulet of red tinged with white that trickled down the side of his head behind his right ear. “Yep. You got him.”
She returned to focus on her own disaster. One colossal, brown curl stuck out the front of her head and looped over in a giant arch. The right side, on the other hand, lay as flat and lovely as a tapeworm. A few grunts of her own and a frustrated, “Aaaggghh,” and she placed the iron on the counter.
“That’s as good as it’s gonna get today,” she muttered, a grimace of disgust on her face.
“Hat day?” Manny asked.
“Hat day.”
Back by the sink, Manny looked into the mirror to make sure the blood had stopped flowing. The ever-present acne returned his gaze, daring him to try a new remedy to rid him of the curse. Almost forty-five years old. It wasn’t going away, his burden to bear.
For a moment, he imagined himself in another forty-five years, rolling up to the dermatologist’s office in his motorized wheelchair, running over a teenager who stood in his way. A sarcastic, sadistic sneer forming on his lips.
“Save your money. You’ll just end up like me anyway,” he cackled.
He put the wheelchair into reverse and climbed the teenage hill he had created. Forward again, causing the boy to make a funny noise like a slice of bologna being thrown against the refrigerator.
“Ha, ha!” he cried out. “I’m king of the world!”
“You’re what? You’re speaking to squirrels?” his wife called from the other room.
“Nothing, honey,” he said as he flipped on the light for the walk-in closet.
Manny searched the tie rack until he found a two-toned blue tie with little black squares that gave anyone who saw it the impression that they were on a really weak, almost monochromatic acid trip. It was his favorite piece of neckware, given to him by his late Aunt Tinsie, an eccentric sort who spent most of her money feeding the woodland critters that visited her three-bedroom house on the edge of the old forest. She would have gone broke long before she died if it wasn’t for the trust fund her insurance broker husband had left her when he passed away from cataracts at age fifty-six. That and the blackjack parlor she ran out of her garage.
Truth be told, the husband, Bob Smith, didn’t really die from cataracts. He was one of those types who refused to go to the doctor’s, insisting that his vision would clear up with enough carrots and the right type of reading glasses. By the time the thick white film had hardened over his eyes, he couldn’t tell the difference between a cat and a rabid badger.
Immediately after the badger incident, Bob wandered off into the pine forest wearing nothing but a pair of rusty cargo shorts and an AC/DC concert t-shirt. They found old Bob two weeks later with his face buried in a pie that Mrs. Tarringly had left out on the windowsill to cool, a strange, blueberry colored froth dripping from the sides of his mouth. He was moaning and babbling on about how the seventies were the best decade for music. Sheriff Jeremiah had no choice but to shoot him. The medical examiner listed his official cause of death as disco rage. It was later changed to cataracts.
After the funeral, Bob’s best friends loaded him onto the back of his pickup truck and drove him down to the Allegheny River. They put him on a large piece of pressboard and pushed him out into the current, watching until his body floated out of sight.
“Bob would have wanted it this way,” Aunt Tinsie said as she dabbed the corner of her eyes with a tissue.
She lived another thirteen years before she joined her husband on the Allegheny, leaving Manny with only memories, a blue tie, a three-bedroom house, and a lively blackjack business that he ran on the weekends.
The sound of Cap’n Crunch falling into a faux china bowl awakened Manny from his daydream and alerted him that Mary was making breakfast. He hustled downstairs in time to see white water being poured on top of his cereal.
“C’mon, Mary,” he whined. “I told you I don’t want that fat free stuff. If it isn’t whole milk, it isn’t milk.”
“Manny. You know what the doctor told you about eating right, what with your diabetis and all. Either you take the skim or I take away the Cap’n.”
Manny shook his head in disgust, but he knew Mary was right. Dr. Nathan, one of only two doctors in town, had made his diagnosis five months ago to the day. Manny had been sitting on the crinkly parchment paper in the doctor’s office, his feet dangling off the side while he stared at the cutaway model of a human spleen, when Dr. Nathan barged in.
“The results came back yesterday,” Dr. Nathan said. “There’s no doubt you have diabetes.”
“Is it the good kind or the bad kind?” Manny asked.
“There is no good kind.”
“What I mean,” Manny replied with a half-annoyed look on his face, “is this the type where I got to jab myself with a needle every day or the type where I have to eat sugar free ice cream?”
“Sugar free ice cream.”
“So, the bad type,” Manny lamented.
The doctor sent Manny home with a booklet of approved foods that he could eat and promised to let Mary know what he had prescribed, which, of course, broke all the rules on doctor patient confidentiality. Not that that sort of thing mattered out in Chippers Station, Pennsylvania, a little town northeast of Pittsburgh, lost in the far reaches of the Allegheny Mountains on the banks of Buffalo Creek. Manny set off in a huff but not before ripping off a large section of crinkly paper to take home with him to use as a tablecloth.
His life had become a monotony of broccoli, broiled fish, cheddar puffs, spinach, tubers, sugar free and cocoa free chocolate, low salt peanut butter, gluten free rice ‘cakes’, artificial cherries, hard salami, and diet soda. The Tuesday morning Crunch was his lone bright spot of the week.
Manny scooted the chair close to the table and began to eat. He lifted the first spoonful of the Cap’n’s Crunch to his mouth. Milk dribbled down his angular chin and dripped off the pointy end onto the crinkly paper below. Again, he dipped into the sea of sugary, buttery goodness. The spoon clanked off the side of the faux china bowl, setting his teeth on edge. There was not a more annoying sound in the universe, a spoon clanking off the side of a hard bowl, but after Mary had taken away all his plastic bowls – she said only children used those – he was left with no other option other than to endure the industrial clink.
“Manny. Look at the time,” Mary called out from the living room. “You’re going to be late.”
Manny looked at his watch. 8:13. Class would start in twelve minutes and the drive would take ten. He tossed the bowl a little too hard in the sink and watched as it clattered around. Grabbing his jacket, he rushed towards the door.
“Don’t forget to brush,” Mary said.
“I already did. I’ll just chew some gum on my way to school to freshen my breath.” That was a lie, one of many little, harmless white lies he told. No. He wouldn’t chew gum at all. He preferred to let the flavor of his Tuesday treat linger as long as it could as if by doing so he could hold onto a better time and place.