Sharpening

It was the kid's third comb this week. You know, one of those old style combs you might use to slick back your hair with brylcreem, back in the 50s. He loved those movies. Rebel without a Cause. American Graffiti. Giant. It was a comb with a long handle. It was a Goody comb. It was black, and now he stood, at the back of the room, at the pencil sharpener, sharpening that comb handle, while the other kids worked on their math.

He had a plan for the sharpened comb. The other two had been experiments. He'd stuck them into things until they broke. The first one he stuck into cardboard: one layer, then two, then three. It failed at five. It didn't break so much as bend and lose its strength. The shank of it showed the telltale whitening of structural stress. So the kid bought another one, and sharpened it, during English.

The second one the kid took home and stuck into his cat. He could do this because the kid's cat trusted him. Didn't think that betrayal was in the air. He could do this because he didn't really like the cat, but he was good at making the cat think he did, which said something about the kid's ability to act. The cat lived. The comb pierced its hide just below the rib cage because it sensed, too late, that something was up, and managed to take off before the plastic spear entered more than half an inch.

The kid got a feel for it though - what it felt like to stick something living. And that was enough. Now he would do it. Within the next three days. The kid could feel it. The question he asked himself was whether he could do it and not get caught, that is, make it seem innocent. An accident.

One thing the kid had going for him was that everyone thought he was honest. Honest and innocent. You see, the kid was small. Short, I mean. Which lent to his relative obscurity. When he sharpened the third comb during math class, the sharpener was a bit high for him and he had to stand on his toes to get enough leverage to get the handle going fast enough to make the tip sharp and to keep the plastic from fraying and fuzzing too much. For the kid wanted it sharp, he wanted it sturdy, and it needed to be sleek. He wanted it to keep sliding in when he pushed it.

The kid knew that when it happened it would happen so fast that the comb would have to be perfect. The kid also had two more in his pockets that were blunt. These were the decoys. This was part of the plan. He'd been combing his hair with the combs for the past few weeks. At first the other kids thought it was weird, and they told him so. Then some of them said it was cool too.

So by the time he stabbed Bobby Bueckert in the eye with it, everyone thought that Bobby just hadn't been watching. That the kid hadn't either. That he'd been combing his hair back with those crazy long handled combs he'd been using for the past few weeks, and somebody's eye socket got in the way. The sharpened comb never entered Bobby's brain, but they had to put a glass eye in his left socket before he came back to school.

That was the next school year though. By then the kid had moved on to pencils. He'd rub the eraser down to the metal and start sharpening that cylinder, on the desk legs, his zipper, anything that rasped.

Ride report

in: -26'C wind WNW 30ks (flatted on mile three; repaired it at June's)

out: -16'C wind SSE 25ks