Fri, 7 November

HAIRCUT, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER The barber tilts the boy's chin up. Outside: teacher workday, no school, the hours fat and provisional. Clippings fall like a calendar shedding its appointments— each curl a task completed before it was assigned. The father watches in the mirror, which holds another mirror, which holds another father watching another boy grow smaller and more numerous into a corridor no one can walk down. By evening the conversation narrows to a single oval of lamplight. What did you do today? Nothing. Tell me about nothing. And the child, for once, does— lays it out like a blueprint, every empty hour load-bearing, every wall of nothing holding up the house.