"For a Smoother, Fresher You, Try Gillette"

Howard Harmony wakes tiredly to the shrilly screaming alarm and walks from his side of the bed to the sink in the master bath, his bare feet poking out the bottoms of his pajamas and slapping against the cold, tiled floor. He looks at his haggard face in the mirror, and between the flecks of dried spit and toothpaste, he can see how rapidly age is taking hold. His cheeks sag like heavy pouches from his wearied eyes. The stubble he had longed to grow as a fresh-faced youth so many years ago, now seems an eyesore, peppering the southern hemisphere of his face in shades of black and grey. It is time, he decides, to rid himself once more of the unwanted growth––until, at length, it will inevitably return again.
He slathers the foamy gel on the front of his neck and along his jawline and up on his cheeks, then shakes his hands in the sink and picks up the razor and looks himself hard in the eyes. Enough. He has had enough of it already. Time to start shearing the waste.
Down he brings the tri-bladed head over the stalled line of traffic, the real slow-moving one just over from the carpool lane where he putters by himself in an ancient Toyota since he lives out of the way of his coworkers and isn’t well enough friends with them anyway to want to share a ride. Down over that highway lane, so congested with commuters, he scrapes the blades, tearing up gnarled shreds of asphalt and great shears of car metal, windshields bursting and engine hoods crumpling, tires bursting and bouncing, escaping down the road faster than the bodies they were once attached to. And there in that Toyota, where he breathes in the fumes from the car ahead through his open window, hacking on a waning cigarette in the morning heat, he watches as the supermassive razor blades rip through fancy luxury vehicles with their leather upholstery and built-in LCD screens and on through the great honking semis and the tailgating Hummers sneaking up from behind like battle tanks with guns mounted and readied. And it pleases him to see the hot ash fall from his fingers and onto the edges of the sink, and to see the broken remains of the FM radio shattering round the drain, incapable now of bursting into fits of static and Spanish in the fleeting shade of each highway overpass. All this he shears off one cheek and washes far down the pipes. Then he starts on the other.
Down he brings the Gillette Mach3 over the rows of office cubicles, making pure mincemeat of the L-shaped desks and the Dell processors, bulletin boards and waste paper bins––and poof! it all launches for the paneled ceiling with the long over-illuminating T8 fluorescents in a fierce spray of stationary confetti, and his boss then is no longer screaming deadlines in his ears, but screaming bloody murder instead, and soon screaming nothing at all as the blades take his head clean off, passing so swiftly and nicely through the workspace as advertised. Up goes the water cooler in a glug-glug-glug and the needless needling migraines and the electronic chatter of blaring phone rings and the tic-tic-tac keyboard typing, all through the fine edges of the reaping razors, and the corporate red tape bleeds its true colors on neat white collars and his circadian rhythm inches that much closer to normal as it all gets flung down on a stubborn toothpaste stain in the basin and flushed away by warm waters.
Howard Harmony rubs the smooth, clean skin of his face with his fingers and admires the workmanship in the mirror. He attempts a smile, but discovers all is not well yet. He thinks of increasing taxes and mounting bills and ignored holidays and pesky neighbors and their obnoxious children and his demonic in-laws and observed holidays and delicious things with too many calories and internet pornography and sweaty church handshakes with forced smiles to go with them and passing airport security and his nagging wife breathing phlegm in her sleep in the bedroom and their damned terrier with its unending stomach problems.
So he breaks open the head of the razor and pulls out a thin sliver of metal and pinches between his fingers a lock of fine hair on his head and decides to finish the job he has started.