Milly Strelzoff

Beard

It showed up one day. You know how it goes, a week of busyness and it all boils down to: you wake up one day and a garden of hair stubbornly colonizes your chin.

You tell yourself you will sneak into music class; after all, you sit in the back and no one else sits near you. For all you know, they all have beards too.

You tell yourself that you will take care of the beard in a bit.

That, of course, is only till the beard takes over your cheeks and face and meets up with the hair on your head. They then sprout in a relative-meets-relative jollity.

Then you look out onto the world through this follicular filter and the world seems good. That, of course, is when Beard comes alive.

I took to sitting on benches and letting Beard look around.

A little girl with a pair of pink-edged kid’s sunglasses sits near her mother. The girl gets up, makes a large circle around me. The circles get smaller and smaller. She comes up in the smallest circle and insists she will pull my beard. “Ok, honey,” I say, her mother wrathfully looking at us. The mother, she knows Beard, the child just sees him.

The girl pulls my chin hair.

All is well, and all Beard clues discovered, the little girl goes back to talk to her mother.

I am sure she is telling her, “Mommy, the beard man is good. He was nice to me.”

She is gesturing and pointing to me and I feel holy and the center of attraction, spotlighted on a stage.

A few minutes later, they both come to me. The woman bends low and I think she is going to tug at my hair too.

She reaches both hands in and feels around inside. Her fingers make small circles. After all, if you want to move in a forest, you can’t walk in a straight line.

Meanwhile she is glowering at me, and I sit as still as I can. Who knows what she will touch next?

Her daughter lets out a scream.

“Mommy you found em, you found em.”

Mommy holds aloft some shining pink.

“Disgusting man,” says the woman, “trying to steal a child’s glasses.”

I just pat and stroke Beard in reply. He trembles and susurrates. I smile, and no one notices. Smile is still living under the Beard.

You see, there is just one secret about Beard and me. Beard and I, you know, we are like old friends.

Beard is in his tenth generation. The first time I grew Beard was when Margo left me. She stopped sharing the bed at first.

Then she stopped staying with me.

She then would come home and sleep over sometimes, still not sharing that bed, but sharing the toilet. One night she took me out to dinner. I bought her new boyfriend a pizza she could take back to him.

In answer, I grew a beard. I thrust it at her to speak his words and tell her all, messaging her.

I never saw her again. Either she is dead or I am or we are both alive, she in Margo-world and me in Beard.

Milly Strelzoff is a writer and mother of three children who are a constant source of inspiration. She lives in Hattiesburg. Her personal blog with short stories has been featured on Sulekha.com. She is a computer programmer and an avid reader of all genres of fiction and non-fiction.