He was sleeping when he felt the icy thin edge of the blade across his throat. He turned from his warm pillow and froze with fear and disgust. The Ugly Man stood above him, holding a glistening razor and was trying and failing to smile. The Ugly Man had haunted his dreams for years as a child and he wrote the Ugly Man off in passing as his childhood imagination running a bit too wild. But there he was, a grown adult sleeping in his grown adult bed next to his grown adult wife, and there was the Ugly Man. The Ugly Man cocked his head and then threw it back; motioning to him that this was not a place to talk. The man, Michael, looked out of the corner of his eye to his wife. Her sleeping form haunted his peripheral, as he couldn't tear himself away from The Ugly Man. Michael carefully crawled from his bed, weary of his slumbering wife. He followed The Ugly Man downstairs and into the dark kitchen. With only the pale moonlight filling the room, he noticed an empty slot of the knife block and quickly eyed the Ugly Man's tight fist coiled around the boning knife's handle. The knuckles, webbed in scar tissue, were white from the strain. The Ugly Man's face fell from its disastrous attempt at smiling, and shifted itself into an imploring frown. Somehow, some way, half remembered from his childhood dreams, Michael understood what The Ugly Man was asking of him. Before any response from Michael could be issued, any concerns or questions, The Ugly Man's hand blurred with preternatural speed and slashed surgically at Michael's unguarded and yielding throat. While not completely severing Michael's head from his body, the Ugly Man had cut him in such a way that if Michael kept leaning slightly forward, his throat would stay enough together that he would live. But if his weight shifted, he would only have moments left to breathe a couple of last breaths. The Ugly Man looked at Michael, his head tilting from side to side like a confused dog, but the prayerful look that seemed to literally bleed from the Ugly Man's eyes informed Michael that this was simply incentive to help the Ugly Man find his life again. Michael thought about his wife and unborn daughter. He nodded as much as he could, his hands instinctively holding his wound shut. The Ugly Man's unarmed hand rose to Michael's face. His scarred, gnarled digits carefully, almost thoughtfully, passed down over Michael's eyes, making his fluttering eyelids close and stay fast. Michael's closed eyes and open mind was being flooded with images. His vision adjusted to the harsh white lights, buzzing fluorescent. Glare came from the too-clean walls; so sterilely white it made him nauseous. Beeps and mechanical whirs flooded his ears, as did the hurried din of voices. He shook his head to the side quickly, brushing away the cotton that seemed to numb his senses. He focused on the first face he saw when he looked straight ahead. The face of his wife, her legs in stirrups, pressing herself up on a hospital bed. She wore the painful joy of childbirth well, he thought to himself. The droning voices found themselves a source when Michael looked over at the doctor and a nurse, both professionally fawning over the labor. One last push, they said, we can see the head, they said. Michael lifted his hand to his throat. There was no clean slice risking his life with precarious balance. Not even a scar. It had never happened, he thought. I had zoned out and daydreamt the Ugly Man. A gangplank of weight lifted itself from his heart and his queasiness subsided. The pealing cries of a newborn snapped him back to reality. Would you like to cut the cord, the nurse asked, looking towards Michael, but not at. Yes, he answered with an unsure smile that betrayed this momentous occasion with suspicious doubt. As he took the clamp and the surgical scissors, severing the connection between his wife and daughter, his eyes darted to the side and he cast a longing and lingering glance at the new life he had brought into the world. While seemingly impossible, the baby seemed to smile at him. His heart caught in his throat as her attempt looked exactly like the Ugly Man's attempt, and he realized he had helped the Ugly Man find his life after all.