Faith McAlester silently wept as she cut her hair.
It had taken her three days to decide. Three days of hiding out in warehouses, clutching the thin oily braid in her skeletal fingers, chewing at the end and feeling the strands slide around her teeth, wet and sour. Those ends were now scattered across the floor, curled slightly, sticking together in gnarled clumps and tangles.
She tried to suppress the sobs, feeling her chest tighten and swell, and held another clump out at arms length. Shutting her eyes tightly, she pressed the rusty edge of the razor blade into the tresses and sawed, her scalp prickling in pain, until the tension abruptly was cut off with a crunching sound and her hand fell loosely to her side. She looked down and saw the long black strands still clenched tightly in her fingers, and felt tears trickle from the corner of her eyes down the sharp edges of her face.
She cursed under her breath, and swiped at them roughly with her sleeve, before blindly reaching towards her scalp to find another handful. Her fingers were trembling, and suddenly inept, as though her body was set against her mind. She could feel the shadows of her mothers fingers in her own, sweetly and clumsily working through tangles, smoothing the snarls, gently weaving braids down her back.
What would her mother say if she could see her daughter, a refuge in the dark cellar of a tenement, resolutely slashing through her beautiful hair?
Not so beautiful anymore, she thought miserably, as her jagged nails caught on an impossible, tangled clump. She didn't need a mirror to tell her that the streets had not been kind to her. Her bones were sharp and thin, outlined against her shrunken skin and flesh, making her look like both a child and a corpse. Her cerulean eyes that her mother had loved so much seemed to have grown in her face, and were outlined with exhausted, dark circles. Thick red sores ran along the curve of her back, and across her stomach was a swollen dark scar, clumsily done up with black thread, that made her look as though she had been sewn together.
Whispering her mothers name like a hymn, she ran her hands along the side of her head, and let the short strands slide between her fingers. Almost done.
Pressing back emotion, she blindly fumbled around the back of her scalp and grabbed at the strands. She could only imagine what she looked like, hair falling in jagged edges around her dirty face, lopsided and ugly. Fighting back the wave of repulsion that wracked her small frame, she shut her eyes as she dug the razor into the locks once more.
"All for the best." She told herself, her voice darkened at the edges with a ragged city accent. The hair came free with the same snapping, crunching sound that made her skin tighten along the back of her neck and fingers. She worked quickly, hoping to separate emotion from action, sentiment from motion. Her scalp was stinging with pain, and her head was beginning to ache, her fingers slowly going numb as she worked. "They ain't gonna find you like this." She promised herself in a whisper. "They ain't gonna find you like…this…" The word came out tight and unnatural as she sheared the last handful of hair away from her scalp.
She dropped the razor, feeling the sting in her palms where the back had pressed into them, and raised her hands to her head, trying to quell the way they trembled in the darkness. She felt lightheaded, the weight of her hair impossibly gone, curled in pieces on the floor. Half in wonder, half in anguish, she ran her fingers through the strands, amazed at the way they seemed to stick up as opposed to sliding back down to brush against her shoulders. Unable to stop herself, she felt all over her scalp, mourning the loss.
"A woman's hair is her secret," Her mother had told her once, as she worked her fingers through her daughters thin, shining tresses. "During the day, it's pinned up and concealed. But during the night, when she is alone with her man, she pulls the pins away and reveals her secrets, her mysteries."
Faith could feel the tears coming, but she was ready for them. She calmly swallowed the swollen lump in her throat, took three deep breaths, and then pushed herself forwards onto her hands and knees. She could make out the dark outlines of the clothes lying on the floor in front of her, crumpled and worn, but clean. Hesitating only for a moment, she reached out, touched a cuff with one finger, before grabbing them and pulling them towards her. She arranged them in a crumpled pile before her knees, and reached behind her to undo the lacings of her dress.