Freddy’s beard was long, full, & well-maintained.  He used products specifically designed for men that were made with brutal names & aggressive ingredients.  Freddy stroked his beard when he preened contemplative on his numerous candlelight dates.  

Freddy’s sideburns from his dark, devil-may-care hair blended perfectly into his deep chestnut beard. Daily trimmings with a magnifying mirror & sharp snipping scissors kept the shape pruned.  Freddy finalized his pre-party primping with a perfumed oil to add sheen & hold shape, worked through with a fine-toothed bone comb from his grooming kit arranged neatly on the vanity.  

The fine-toothed bone comb slid through the strands when a flash of silver snatched on the comb’s tooth.

A white beard hair.

Crinkled, without pigment or dignity of texture.

Freddy dropped the bone comb, shattering the teeth, when a ghostly warning bled into the haunted air, “Silver strands grow deep.”

The front of Freddy’s beard shifted from black to grey to white, the color bleeding away, blending like a flurry that eventually covers a dark forest, what was shadow now bright & gleaming, each follicle a representation of an icy memory never realized, a dark story of self filling in.

“Help! My beard is haunted”, screamed Freddy, but no one in his complex cared to hear him.

His beard heard him though & sprouted more colorless hair to fill in the memory blanks with humiliation: his behavior, his words, his beliefs, his very core.

A stainless electric trimmer was charging on Freddy’s vanity & he ruthlessly buzzed off his beard, starting with the rapidly spreading silver sides.

As Freddy brushed the final shavings off his face with soft grooming brush, he admired his handsome chiseled chin. Along the side of his strong jaw long, a thick white whisker remained, a straight bristle sticking deeply indented in the sore pore.

Repulsed, Freddy plucked the hair with needle-nose tweezers, tightly tugging, the pore clogged with the deep-rooted, infected dirt of the man.  The bristle released with an audible POP & a stream of air flowed out, deflating Freddy’s face, a stinking breeze blowing through the expanding, floppy pore.

Freddy’s flaccid face hung limp & empty; moving his mouth made the empty skin slap.  

He picked up the white whisker from the vanity & sincerely looked at its twisted growth & the truth it tormented.  It was nasty, but it was his, so he slipped it into the pore, into the slack skin sack of his chin.  

One after another, Freddy beheld his miserable follicles & filled his face with hair like an old lumpy mattress, wadding in spectral strands. 

Freddy never updated his profile pics, so when his numerous candlelight dates arrived, they were shocked by Freddy’s unformed features.  Every word he said was uncomfortable from inside hair splinters, stabbing the soft interior of his jaws.  So Freddy spoke less, & if the dates stayed for a single drink usually, he listened, but was still left alone, only accompanied by the anguished emptiness of his deflated ego.

Halloween 2025