The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins
My rating: 4/5 cats
OH MY GOD GIANT EVIL BEARD CUTOUT!!! BEST IDEA EVER!
Beneath the skin of everything is something nobody can know. The job of the skin is to keep it all in and never let anything show.
dave lives here. not here, in my studio apartment with me – that would be crazy. no, he lives in a place called “here,” which is a tightly controlled walled-off urban island, where everything is impeccably, impossibly neat. the streets make up a perfectly-aligned grid, the trees are obsessively maintained, everyone is well-groomed and polite, and every person every day follows the same routine like clockwork.
dave is a completely hairless individual, except for his eyebrows and this one stubborn hair under his nose that grows back immediately no matter what he does to remove it. he works at a&c industries, where his days are spent deeply immersed in charts and graphs and powerpoint presentations, organizing numbers and data into orderly rows. but he has no idea what the company actually does. and neither does anyone else working there.
And every lunchtime, once he’s conveyed all of the latest information in his careful brightly coloured, many-fonted presentation, Dave was always left with a nagging question at the end: did any of what he’d just said mean anything at all? And following the question, the familiar, disturbing suspicion that the real reason for all the data and the meetings for A&C even being here was fear.
and fear of what, you ask?? fear of “there.”
“there” is what exists out past the boundaries of “here,” out past the sea – a place of disorder, chaos and evil. i mean, reputedly. no one has ever actually been “there” and lived to tell the tale, but the mythology of “there” persists in urban legends – those who venture “there” undergo a painful reassembly where their bodies are turned inside out
and
dave’s free time is spent in his chair sketching the view outside his window and listening to this song over and over to keep the questions and the fears and the “untidy dreams” at bay.
until the day everything changes.
that stubborn hair that has plagued him all his life begins to multiply and grow unstoppably and equally resistant to grooming or cutting.
and all hell breaks loose.
dave’s beard upsets the natural order of here as it begins to grow and grow and eventually take over the town. at first he is a curiosity that people line up to gawk at through windows, but the beard’s continued growth becomes alarming – this can’t happen “here.”
anxiety breeds anarchy and the ordered foundations of “here” become vulnerable. the story becomes a funny and haunting commentary on everything from the stagnation of conformity to the flash fire spread of celebrity to the mutability of legacy. it is beautifully drawn, occasionally subtle and cautionary without becoming treacly.
plus, it is one of the best titles ever.
and it works in any language:
do not resist the evil beard!
