Shave

M_ finds that if he tilts his head back like this - a further 90° or so - and moves some stray piece of hair out of his right eye, like this  - he can see through the narrow gap beneath the blind in the bottom left-hand corner of the window. A bright wedge of light  coalescing into something like form if he squints determinedly at it for long enough . His brow folds in on itself, these little creases of concentration. Look: a hard edge, something dark and solid, a splash of red, a blur of movement.

A game - like a mental exercise or something - forgetting everything he already knows about what lies immediately outside that window, then piecing together a new view based entirely on this very limited information now available.

The corner of a balcony wall, a flower - don't know - bright - a geranium maybe. A cat? No - shit - wait. That's what he knows it is - he's trying to clear his stored memories again but it's too difficult and pointless.So he close his eyes and focuses on some scratch of small pain - the metal spike of an earring as it presses into this tender place behind here, where the jawbone attaches to the rest of the skull. When he tries to imagine what this place looks like, without the flesh and skin and hair that it's buried beneath, it fades out into this crude, cartoon approximation of a skull.  It doesn't even have a jawbone - just a row of kind of goofy front teeth. He knocks his own skull gently, three times against the windowsill, to dislodge the image.

This movement reverberates through the rest of the body. The razor skitters a little, carves out this miniature pocket of skin. The man exhales sharp through his nose - like a horse - M_ thinks looking intently at a patch of exposed scalp on the top of the man's head. A beam of light from the lamp directly illuminates the place, it's like a pool of spotlight on some tiny stage - any moment now some scaled-down singer might step out into it and start performing. M_ smirks and shifts his hips some, the movement causes the man to make his horse-snort again.

"Keep still - damn - "

and the blade slices out another insignificant chunk of flesh - the man rubs at it brusquely, with his thumb. A smear of blood in a streak of foam - like some kind of Masai-ish blood and milk supper. Ugh thinks M_, mildly.

"Sorry" he whispers.

The man returns to his task. He's frowning intently at this small patch just to the right of M_'s pubic bone. The tip of his tongue protrudes just there, from the corner of his mouth, very pink. The blade itches, it makes a noise similar to this scratch of pen across paper. That other noise is a second man positioned a little behind the first, masturbating.

M_ falls asleep, sort of.