Curiosity
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Disclaimer: Ninja Turtles is not mine. Venus would still exist if it was.
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In Chung I's home village, the women wash their hair in the river. They sit on the rocks and dip their sleek black hair in the cold running water. They gossip and chat as they comb soap through their hair with their fingers, then wash it out again. They sit beside their friends, knee to knee, and comb out tangles in one another's hair. As their hair dries, they braid it, trying out new hairstyles on one another, laughing and giggling at the results.
Mei Pieh Chi has no hair. She can sit on the rocks, and the women will include her in their gossip and teasing, but she has no hair. No one will sit behind her, fingers brushing the nape of her neck as they bind her hair back, muttering about tangles. As a child she never sat in the lap of a mother or sister, fidgeting as they braided her hair, impatient to get away. She has never known that casual intimacy.
She is curious about hair. It seems unreally beautiful, like the pelt of some exotic animal. She once saw a white tiger killed. Alive, it was beautiful in motion, liquid-muscles rippling beneath the white-and-black fur, and she'd instantly longed to touch, to skim her hand across the fur and feel the heat of it's skin and pulse of it's blood beneath her palm. After they killed it, she'd touched the fur and felt only the cold of death.
Human hair is much the same. Sometimes she'll pick hairs from combs and roll them between her fingers, but it isn't the same. It is discarded, dead stuff, shed by the body. She longs to touch her friends' sleek black hair, but doesn't quite know how to ask. Chung I is very strict on propriety, and she is sure he'd disapprove of such a request.
That doesn't stop her from looking, and wondering.
She is sitting beside the river oneday, as the women gossip around her. She is dabbling her feet in the water and thinking about going for a swim. The currents are strong, but she is the best swimmer in the entire village and they pose little threat to her.
She hears Ling approaching long before the human reaches her. The girl walks barefoot across the rocks, and her skirt flaps about her legs in the breeze.
"Close your eyes, Mei Pieh," Ling calls out, her lovely voice rising and falling in a sing-song tease. "I have a surprise for you."
Mei closes her eyes, but cannot resist replying.
"It is a pleasant surprise, or an unpleasant one? If so, remember that we are standing beside a river."
"Close your eyes," Ling insists. "And keep them closed."
She kneels behind Mei, and the soft touch of fabric wraps about Mei's head, across her eyes. A blindfold? She smells old perfume on the cloth. Ling knots it at the back of Mei's skull and says:
"You can open them now."
It's not a blindfold after all, Mei realizes. It is a mask, as ninjas wear, with openings for the eyes. She can't think why Ling would be giving her this rather than Chung I. She opens her eyes and feels the mask. When she pulls the tail about to look at, she can see it is of expensive cloth. It is a fine gift.
"A mask?"
Ling nods and grins.
"The ribbon is from my sister's wedding. I saved it, and Chung I said that I may give it to you."
Mei is touched.
"Thank you, Ling."
"It's a little long at the back," Ling continued. "But you may cut it if you choose."
"Cut this beautiful ribbon?" Mei gives her a look of mock-horror, and Ling grins. She looks thoughtfully at the mask.
"I just had an idea…Stay right there."
She kneels behind Mei and begins fiddling with the trailing tails of the mask.
"What are you doing?" Mei asks.
"Getting it out of your way. Hold still." She smacks Mei's shell. "You are like a child. You can't hold still for five seconds, can you?"
Mei huffs out a breath of air and smiles. Ling's fingers are deft and she finishes quickly.
"There," she says. "It won't be in your way now."
Mei reaches about and touches the tails of cloth. They are woven together in a woman's braid, like how the women wear their hair. Feeling is a warm lump in her throat.
"Thank you," she says, those two words containing a whole world of feeling.
"It's just a ribbon," Ling shrugs. She moves about to sit beside Mei. "I was wondering…"
"Yes?"
Ling's cheeks are a little pinker than usual.
"Would you be offended if I asked to touch your shell?" At Mei's quizzical look, she plunged in to explain. "It's just that it has lovely patterns, and I've always wondered what it feels like to touch… Nevermind. I am being foolish."
Mei reaches out and captures Ling's hand, guiding it to the edge of her carapace. Ling's embarrassment fades in favour of curiousity as she trails her fingers over it, tracing the ridges and whorls.
"Can you feel this?" She asks.
"I can feel it," Mei says. "As one feels the floor through a shoe, or with a fingernail. I feel pressure, but it is not direct."
As she speaks, she glances at Ling's hair, still drying from the river, loose about her shoulders.
"May I touch your hair?" She asks, the question blurting out before she can think twice.
"My hair?" Ling looks baffled.
"I have never touched hair before," Mei confessed. "I have none myself, so I do not know what it is like."
Ling pulls her hair forward over one shoulder.
"Here." She takes Mei's hand and guides her fingers to it. It is a strange contradiction of sensations: soft, and yet strong; a million different threads and yet somehow slides over her fingers as one entity.
"Am I hurting you?" Mei asks anxiously. She has seen children pull each other's hair and knows that it causes pain.
Ling smiles.
"No, silly. My hair is like your shell. Unless you give it a good yank, you're not going to hurt me."
Mei removes her hand.
"How odd."
It isn't unpleasant, but nothing she could ever picture atop her own head.
"Curiosity satisfied?" Ling asks.
"Yes."
"That's a pity, because I have one more question."
Ling leans in with the gleam in her eye that precedes her saying something that will shock her listeners and see her mouth washed out with soap if any elder happens to be listening in.
"Your breasts. Are they, you know, soft like mine, or hard like a shell?"
Mei has a look of startled revelation.
"Breasts can be soft?"
Ling giggles and gives her friend a little shove, mistaking her shock for further joking.
"Alright, don't tell me. Come on. Lets show Huan your present."
She rises to her feet and walks back towards the other woman. Mei scrambles after her.
"Ling…Ling, you were joking, right…?"
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