Hair
by Kimberly Starrett
She lies on her back, a pale blue sheet separating her head from her body like a woman in a magic show. She focuses on a Monet print on the ceiling and imagines being sawed apart.
She jumps when the doctor touches her. Not because his hands are cold. They aren’t.
“Sorry,” he says, “I tried to warm them a little.”
“No,” she says and laughs nervously, “It’s just - I’m fine. Go ahead.”
She is squeezed, flattened, molded, pressed and pressed some more. Painfully. The way, she thinks, you test a melon for ripeness or rot.
At the front desk she receives a referral and, picking up her fear, she leaves.
After the diagnosis comes the cut and the stitches and the drain and the scar and the drip, drip, drip of poisons into her veins. The eyes of her friends, once envious of her good job, her good looks, her good marriage, turn pitying. She takes to wearing bulky sweaters and baggy sweatshirts despite the warm weather.
In the bathroom she covers the mirror. Better to remember herself as she’d been: whole, uncut, unedited.
Standing in the shower, she grips the bar for support. With a trembling hand she lifts the razor, touches it to her skin and draws it down then down again. Funny how the hair under her arms, unwanted, unnecessary hair, remains while the rest deserts her strand by strand, eyelash by eyelash.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Her fingers do the work, follow the directions. She’s always been good at following directions, at doing what she’s told. Lather, rinse, repeat.
She steps out of the shower, wraps a towel around her naked, glistening body and another around her dripping hair; then turning, peers into the tub. In the bottom of the tub, like drowned things, dozens, if not hundreds, of strands clump around the drain. They lie there like things once living now limp and lifeless. Mesmerized she leans closer and reaches for a strand which she rescues. She holds it up, long and dark and curling slightly.
It’s the wild hair of her youth; that lioness’s mane that the girls envied and the boys wanted to touch.
In the school yard he pulled her ponytail and she cried. In high school he took the clips from her hair and they made love. On their wedding day she pinned her hair up and after the ceremony, in the hotel, he unpinned and brushed till it shown with a burnished light. He buried his face in it.
“I love your hair,” he said, his hands full of it. He drew her head back for
a kiss. “Don’t ever cut it.”
It was her crown, her glory, it made her beautiful.
When the knock comes she can’t answer; only kneels by the tub, like a supplicant, a mourner.
The door opens and his face appears. “What’s wrong?” He wears a mask of worry. “Should I call the doctor?”
But she can’t speak, only holds up the strand, dull and lifeless in the
light.
If you ask Kimberly Starrett what she writes her standard answer is, "A little of this and a little of that."
Over the last dozen years she has tried her writer's hand at screen plays, stage plays, poetry, novellas, short stories and a novel. Though some people might say this varied approach reflects a lack of discipline, Ms. Starrett prefers to think of her approach as eclectic. "I have trouble choosing a form because I am, quite simply, in love with words. I love to read them. I love to write them. I love to hear them spoken."
She is a self-described book junkie, purchasing perhaps four dozen titles every year. "And that's probably a conservative estimate," she laughs.
Currently she is revising a 400 page novel in the women's fiction genre. "Revision is infinitely harder than the initial writing of the manuscript which was, I thought at the time, the hardest thing I'd ever done."
So if writing is so difficult, why do it? "Because a writer is who I am. It is my heart and soul. And for me, seeing my words in print is the greatest achievement of my life. I couldn't wish for more." Contact Kimberly
