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By Root 141 0

on casual about trade, he’d done the left side of my head, and then he starts shouting at me, I mean real filth. So I thought it was a game right and I joked back. I thought he was joking. I started to heckle him about Nora and me, smiling at him in the mirror all the time and then he slips the towel round behind my neck and pulls back, pulls my neck back over the chair. He got his left arm under my chin—like this—then he opens the razor with his other hand, flicks it open in a movement like he was throwing it away and puts it in my shirt and slits it open in a couple of places. Once the shirt’s open he starts shaving me up and down my front taking the hairs off. I wasn’t moving or saying anything. Thought I’d keep still. Then he slices off my nipple. I don’t think he meant to, was probably an accident. But that got me shouting. Then he lets go my neck and starts shaving my face very fast now small cuts now I was crying from the pain and the tears were going into the cuts, then I got my thumb into the wrist with the razor and got free, that’s when I got really badly cut on the face, this one here. But I got loose and took a small chair against him.’

Right on my head. But I still have the razor and we stand looking at each other. The blood drooling off his chin onto the wet shredded shirt. He takes a quick look at himself in the mirror and the tears just rush out of his face. I am exhausted, sorry for him. Got no anger at him now. I’m finished I’m empty but I can’t tell him. What the hell is wrong with me? And Pickett’s face is hard waiting to come for me, looking around the room. With the chair he got me on the head with, he moves sideways to the sink. With the other hand he lifts the leather strop that has the metal hook on the end of it. He sways it out to the left and then sends it back slowly to the right and lands the hook in the centre of the mirror. $45. It falls onto the towel he has placed in the sink before. In large pieces which is what he wanted. I stand with the razor at the back of the room.

He picks up a large piece of mirror and skims it hard across the room at me. It hits the wall to the left of my shoulder but it came really fast and it scares me. I know he will slice me. He takes the next piece and jerks it at me twenty feet away and it comes straight for me. My neck. Is coming for me I’m dead I can’t. Move. And then catches on a muscle of air and tilts up crashing above my head. Door opens near me. Nora. What! Stay back. And I run to him before he can get more and wave him from the sink with the razor. He holds me back with the chair in his left hand, with the right he swings the strop gets me hard on the left elbow. Broken. Just like that, no pain yet but I know it is broken. He swings the chair but it is too heavy for speed and I avoid it. Swings the strop and gets me on the knee. Numb but I can move it. Next time he swings the chair I drop the razor and wrestle it from him and push him backwards now able to keep the strop off but my left hand still dead. See Nora in another mirror. The parlor is totally empty except for the two of us and Nora shouting in a corner at the back screaming to us that we’re crazy we’re crazy.

Pickett’s face swelled now, he cannot see too well over the puffs. Balance. His strop and my chair. I won’t swing the chair. If I go off balance he will go for the head. My knee is stumbling, pain coming through. Can’t feel my arm. Pickett swings and the strop tangles in the chair. I push hard hard he goes back the wood almost against his face that he doesn’t want me to touch. Push again and he goes over the ice through the front window. A great creak as the thing folds over him like a spider web, he goes through, the hook of the strop pulls the chair and me frantic I won’t let go and I come through too over the ice and glass and empty frame. And we are on the street.

Liberty. Grey with thick ropes of rain bouncing on the broken glass, Pickett on the pavement and now me too falling on the bad arm he kicks but there is no pain it could be metal. We scramble apart. Three feet