the unfinished complete works of d.f. petrella

Riding the Greyhound across Kansas, the newly minted ex-con in the aisle seat is asleep, dreaming of his daughter in Denver. I stare through the face in the black window, the inside lights off, one finger holding the place in a novel I borrowed from a friend before leaving Illinois. My sideburns are starting to curl, the eyebrows creeping back together, undermining my best efforts to keep them apart. And the nose. The nose is much too big, or at least I remember my brothers saying so when I was a kid. In high school, a girl told me I had long, pretty eyelashes and I didn’t know how to take it. Another told me my mouth looked like a turtle’s, the way the upper lip comes to a point in the middle. They’re thin like worms, a girl said in seventh grade. Her mother made her apologize. The helix of my right ear is missing a chunk, just like my uncle who died of an aneurysm at 50 and my cousin who, in her thirties, got liver cancer. The freckles fade when the days get shorter. They say symmetry is equivalent to beauty, so it’s no wonder I can’t get a date. You can already see where the lines will be when I get old. I need a haircut.