Two Stories by Adam Falik

Missed Spot Shaving

He missed a spot shaving, two spots, actually, one on each side of his chin directly below where he might have had dimples if he smiled more.  It was because of this new shaving cream his girlfriend had given him: it went on clear and made his face tingle, but he couldn’t see it and was always missing spots.  But not like this, almost straight lines that sort of flared, and most peculiar was that there was one on each side, missed shaving lines mirrored in perfect symmetry. There was only one word for the effect: feline.

He kept it going for a few days.  They filled in nicely. Atop his head the hair was muddy brown, but on his face the growth was red and blonde.  Doesn’t your mother have red hair? his girlfriend asked. She dyes it, he told her.

Friends thought the look hip, but he knew it was more than that, and over the long Labor Day weekend he graphed out further lines so that when he showed up at the car dealership Tuesday morning his boss called him into her office.  I see you’re kind of going for something, she said. Yeah, he acknowledged, and she answered, Fair enough, but we’re gonna have to move you into the back, away from customers. He thought the arrangement reasonable.

It was no trouble to follow the lines down the rest of his body.  The hair up top he dyed gold with leopard spots, but he didn’t like the imprecision of colorant so instead had his skull tattooed and kept it shaved bald.  He had his teeth sharpened, ears pointed, endured contacts for the yellow eyes but he was talking to a couple of optometrists who had some ideas. His nails were always tearing up the towels and bed sheets but towels and sheets could be replaced; his girlfriend really got off when he sprang onto her back and his claws tore into the mattress and his teeth sank into her shoulder.  Afterwards, he’d curl across her lap; she’d scratch circular patterns into the nape of his neck until he started to purr.

A Tiny Spider

Jerzy once watched something incredibly small happen.  He was riding the subway from Midtown to the Village. A woman leaned forward in her seat reading something from an electronic tablet so that he couldn’t clearly see her face, just the mass of her bleached blonde hair.  Jerzy stared from across the aisle into the blaze of blonde, yellow and gold, a bouquet of chemically-infused hues, until his eyes focused on a single strand of hair from which a tiny spider perched. The spider had crawled to the end of the strand and, as Jerzy watched, released itself on a thread.  It launched while remaining attached by a web-line that extended as it rode the air-conditioned air from the woman towards the chrome pole between the two aisles. He watched the spider transfixed, its thread unraveling, the tiny spider riding with incredible perseverance the ripples of subway air now blowing it off course, somehow realigning itself firmly toward its mark.  Jerzy worried it wouldn’t reach the pole by the time the train entered the next station and the rush of passengers would sweep the whole thing to shambles. And he wondered if this little occurrence had any sense of the magnitude occurring around it, a tiny spider in a subway car packed with passengers rushing home, to their jobs or to some tryst. Jerzy almost couldn’t believe what he was witnessing, the extending length of almost invisible silver thread still attached to the single strand of bleached blonde hair, the spider more than half-way across the subway aisle, the steadiness of it.  Jerzy watched the progression thinking that this was how tremendous things were accomplished, fantastic commitments, trips to Mars, bridges built between canyon bluffs, the spider almost there now, its thread from the woman’s hair to the pole arched like a falling parachute turned on its side, the web billowing outward but the spider navigating the currents. Then the thing was finished. The spider reached and disappeared round the chrome pole just as the train cleared the station. The woman lifted her head and riders aimed towards the subway doors.

There was no looking back, no residue of the event. Resolved, Jerzy followed the line of passengers from the train through the station and up to the street.  He entered into the lawyer’s office and signed the divorce papers.

Adam Falik (www.adamfalik.com) is a writer of fiction, drama, and cultural criticism.  He is an Associate Professor at Southern University New Orleans.