Reflections were things Taym did not like. He hated them almost as much as he hated introspection. He would go days at a time avoiding mirrors if he could; he would avert his eyes from glass-framed pictures on the walls and from darkened windows. He had perfected the art of shaving without needing a mirror.

He always insisted that it wasn't a man's place to be decorative; that it was a woman's work to worry about her appearance. But he never liked the face that looked back at him, and still less the skeletal body. They didn't look like him, or not the him he remembered--the him that had parties at his parent's house with an open bar and girls gathered around the pool, the him that lounged on the wall outside the bar and rarely went home lonely. It wasn't exactly as though he'd ever been particularly good looking. Just that there had been a wolfish, self-assured confidence to him that, combined with his carefully-cultivated Bad Boy aura, was irresistible to a certain type of woman.

The man in the mirror looked like a cancer patient. That was appropriate, given what he was about to do to him.

He lifted the scissors in one hand, and a lock of wavy dark hair in the other, and steeling himself, he looked into the mirror he had propped on the windowsill. A curl fell onto the trash bag he'd spread on the floor.

He had the scissors; he had a bucket of lukewarm water and a handful of cheap supply house safety razors. None of these were ideal tools for the job, nor was sitting on the edge of his bed, leaning into the sunlight, the optimum location. But they were the things he had, and Taym was used to less than ideal circumstances. If he could wield his gear in the confines of a public restroom, he could shave his head in a dorm room. And he'd be damned if he'd do this in the showers, where anyone might walk by and see and feel the need to make clever commentary.

The history of his hair: the snotty little-kid mohawk he'd begged his mom for in the fifth grade; and then he'd grown it out long in seventh grade and kept it down past his chin all the way through high school. His dad giving him a lecture on his first day at a real job about how he'd need to keep it pulled back, because his dad had lost a battle of wills with his mother about making him just get a haircut. A dozen painted-nail hands running fingers through the waves and making him promise to keep it long. April, saying, "use up the last of this jar, honey," so he had hair that was purple in strong light for three weeks.

He'd cut it after Tuesday was born, because this time his father had put his foot down. No haircut, no job. And then he'd needed a job. He'd shaved it bare and April had teared up and laughed at him at the same time, running her hands over the stubble.

"You look like a thug," she'd told him, laughing but unhappy.

A flurry of dark hair had collected on the plastic. He snipped everything down as far as he could and wished there was power, and an electric shaver, but there was a certain suggestion of primitive ritual that was inexplicably soothing. He felt like he ought to be using a sharpened stone, crouched by a river and peering into a sheet of polished brass.

He'd shaved his head after Tuesday was born, when he was getting clean, when he was working, organizing the mess that was his father's secretary's books. He'd shaved his head and he'd turned into a new person. He'd become an adult. He was going to be normal, finally. People weren't going to look at him sideways when he walked into the drugstore. They weren't going to see him immediately go for the syringes, and they weren't going to glare at him over the counter when he paid. He'd go into the drugstore for baby shampoo and for formula and cigarettes and to pick up a stupid trinket for April--a bottle of mint green nail polish, a bar of expensive chocolate. He'd go home and watch TV and give the baby a bath and fall asleep in the new bed.

Taym had been many people in his life and in some way or another he'd killed all of them.

He moved on to the razors.

This was just the latest reinvention, and once again he was telling himself that this time it would stick. He wasn't an enigmatic rake any more, or a charming partier, or a businessman and a father, or a pathetic, homeless junkie. He was shedding his old skins again, and he was sacrificing his hair, small thing though it was--putting it on the altar with the ashes of the people he'd been before. A monk kneeling beneath the razor, relinquishing his worldly ties.

The new Taym did not yet exist. He had thought him a faceless foot soldier destined to die, but the idea was uncomfortable, now, and he longed to give this person inhabiting his skin an identity. He pushed the thought aside and shook the razor in the bucket, dislodging the hair from the blades as best he could. When he blunted them, he moved on to a second.

The scalp under his hair was white and dry; it itched from the razor burn when he dampened his hands and ran them over his head.

Bracing himself, he looked into the mirror. He ran his fingertips along the sharp line of his browbone jutting through his temple; he pushed his ears flat as though he could make them stop sticking out like a chimpanzee's, and he touched the healed bumps on his earlobes where piercings had once been, long ago grown over. He felt nothing. No grief, no relief, no disgust.

After a final check for missed spots that came up clean, he emptied the bucket out the window, and then gathered up the fallen hair and emptied that as well. It looked like someone had been scalped in the grass outside.

He put the mirror back into his dresser, turned upside down to avoid any accidental contact with his own reflection. With any luck, it would be a long time before he looked in one again.