The Passing by Benjamin Aldy

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The house was quiet enough to hear the night breathing.
Luke climbed the stairs like a man walking into his own story.
Every step groaned under him, every shadow on the wall seemed to lean close, watching.
He carried the smell of the barbershop with him—talc, oil, warm steel—and the ghost of the clippers hummed in his skull.

He closed his door and faced the mirror.

The lamplight cut a warm circle on the dresser, and in that circle he met someone he half-recognized.
His face had been waiting under the old hair all along.
Forehead bare and proud.
Ears carved out of shadow.
Neck running clean and smooth into the collarbone.
The flat top above it all like a small piece of architecture that turned his whole body into something sharper, truer, stripped of every soft lie.

He raised his hand and set it on his head.
The bristles pushed back, alive under his palm.
He slid toward the crown, almost bare, and the air there carried a private thrill, like the wind itself had learned his name.
A breath shuddered out of him.
The boy who’d walked in this morning was gone.

The door creaked.

He saw his father in the mirror first.
A figure in the frame. Silent. Still.
The weight of him filled the room before his footsteps did.

Luke froze, hand hovering in the air.

His father crossed the carpet slow, each step heavy with a kind of ceremony neither of them would name. He came to stand beside his son, both of them now in the mirror, and for a moment neither spoke. They just looked at this new head, this new face, this young man standing where a boy used to live.

"Bill did you right," his father said, voice low, nearly a whisper.

Luke nodded.

The hand rose. "May I?"

Luke bowed his head just enough.

The hand settled.
Solid.
It moved over the stiff top, down the short hair in the center, to the soft heat of the crown, and Luke felt it travel deeper than the skin, like the touch went straight into the center of him.
A nod at the mirror.
No more words. None needed.

Luke met his own eyes and knew it was done.
The haircut, the moment.
The air felt different in his lungs.
The night felt different outside his window.
He was bare now, and he was alive.

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