An Unnamed Woman in an Unnamed Town

I was being followed by someone wearing my hair. Not someone with hair like mine, not someone whose length, texture, color, whatever was close to mine. My hair. Mine. I knew because I had pulled it from my head myself.

I was walking home from work, along the river. Late, we closed the bookstore at 10:00pm, though traffic usually died by 7:00pm, 7:30pm. Society had taught me that walking alone as a woman is one of the stupidest and most dangerous things you can do. Add late at night on a secluded footpath? Forget it. I must’ve had a death wish. I was simply begging to be raped, murdered, dismembered, kidnapped, tortured, kept as a second wife in some maniacal evangelical’s basement because God told him too, even though we all know that this person probably never even read a bible, only could quote random bits he remembered from church during his early years – likely the same verses from when he was undergoing whatever formative event led him to kidnapping a young woman to keep in his basement.

I didn’t want to buy a car and in Bumfuck, Illinois the public transportation stopped running at the god-fearing hour of 8:00pm, because anyone out and about after then was probably trying to sin and the mayor would not let his taxpayers fund sin with their money. He also worked so that taxpayers wouldn’t be fund healthcare, childcare, education, and saving the environment with their money either, because he was a good father and Republican, and really Cared About the Country. So, the bus wasn’t an option either.

Which is what led me to the river path every evening as my most direct route home. I could’ve tried to chart a path through flickering streetlamps and populated areas, but I am a woman who loves solitude.

I am not ambitious. I have been told that I shouldn't like my simple little life, unless I’m an influencer touting the joys and aesthetics of rural-small-town-Edward Hopper-still-life-Pinterest board life. I live small, I curl up in what is comfortable and slow. What’s quiet. I tried to live a successful life, once, in Chicago. I did what my parents wanted, did what my friends were doing. I thought I was doing what I wanted then, too. Now I was working the sort of job, making the sort of money, and living the sort of life that would make those same friends whisper in horror: “a retail job!” Who could blame them? They came from parents whose generation simultaneously demanded fresh flipped burgers yet demeaned anyone who flipped them.

The river path was what I loved most about my little town. It was brick, tree-lined, and had a gazebo. Quaint bridges crisscrossed a placid river, and all the small businesses that kept the town afloat lined it up and down, some with patios, all with big windows to frame the view. We relied on the rich people from Chicago and Milwaukee to drive down for weekend escapes, to stay in a cozy Airbnb or the Inn with the giant water wheel from when it was a mill. Surprisingly, this supported quite a lot of specialty shops – like my humble bookstore, and a shop that sold nothing but honey and honey-related kitsch, called “The Honeypot” which was a topic of controversy every year when someone mentioned it at town hall and all the aldermen debated if it violated the town’s bylaws or not. This was also a part of why I didn’t worry about being murdered. We weren’t that kind of small town; you couldn’t find any Annie Wilkes here.

I saw Her, I think it was a her, for the first time walking along the river path home. Late at night, not worrying about getting murdered or mugged. The air was filled with the scent of almost-rain and falling leaves. Wet cement and a hint of frost. I watched my breath start to turn white in the glow of the streetlamps. I wasn’t listening to music or a podcast, which was unusual for me, but that evening I wanted to hear the night music, the tip tap of my sneakers on brick, the soft rush of the river, the wind patiently winding its way through the leaves, some leaves falling, some leaves crunching.

Which is how I heard Her footsteps, on the upper path.

To help avoid flooding, all the businesses and apartments and houses were built higher than the river, leaving a stretch of grassy slope between them and the river path that goes along the bank. For certain portions, there was a stretch of sidewalk that went along the backs of these businesses and homes parallel to the lower river path.

I shouldn’t have been able to hear the steps, but it’s quiet in a small town late at night on a Tuesday. And she must’ve been wearing hard-soled shoes, or maybe fucking tap shoes, I don’t know, because I realized that my footsteps weren’t the only ones I was hearing. I paused, and the other steps continued, for a couple more beats. Then silence.

I looked around, that warm chill of adrenaline starting to trickle through my body. Nothing but trees, brick, and indigo water beside me. I looked to the upper path.

She was facing away, a dark jacket and dark jeans, I think. And my hair, gently moving with the wind.

My hand went to the hair still on my head, finding its favorite spot, to the right, and just below the crown of my skull. Her hand moved too, going to the same spot. I froze, throat tightening, hot cheeks and cold body. Her hand kept moving, it was difficult to see from a distance, but Her moves were so familiar to me that I could tell what She was doing – feeling different strands of hair and plucking defective ones from their roots with a sharp, controlled tug.

I couldn’t see far enough to visually verify that She had plucked some hairs out, but She held up her hand, a dishwater taupe strand pinched between thumb and middle finger. She raised it to the sky and released the hair to the dark and the wind.

I went for my phone, but my gloved fingers let it slip and crash to the bricks. I stooped to retrieve it, but in those frantic seconds, She was gone. My mind didn’t know how to process what had just happened so I stayed, crouching on the bricks, viselike grip on my phone, trying to breathe, maybe cry and stay alert all at once.

Some amount of time went by, and I finally checked my phone screen to make sure it wasn’t shattered. It survived.

One of my knees cracked as I released myself from my crouch and started home. The comforting dark didn’t seem so safe anymore. The confidence that I would make to from A to B wasn’t there. As someone raised to be at home in solitude and to be at ease in self-reliance, I was disoriented. I didn’t know how to proceed, was I supposed to keep walking? Should I call someone? I looked at the short list of contacts on my phone, some nostalgic names that I no longer called, but instead wistfully kept looking at and inspire daydreams of things I could’ve done differently. There was no one I could call, so I would have to go home. My emergency contact had been dead three years and the number was disconnected, but I kept writing it on forms. Still had it at the top of my contacts.

My nerves dragged my eyes back to the upper path, watching for the horrifying familiarity of a shadow wearing my hair as Her own.

Around 10:45pm, I unlocked my front door slammed it behind me, fuck the neighbors. I checked the little whiteboard calendar next to the door to see when I needed to get be at the bookstore the next morning. 10:00am. Focusing on the commonplace ritual of checking a work schedule gave me a brief respite from the thrashing fear I had tamed, somewhere behind my lungs and above my liver. Tomorrow I would be able to rationalize and blame the evening’s events on something other than the irrational supernatural.

And there were so many things to blame! I was tired, I was stressed, I was overworked, my various mental maladies decided to all flare up at the same time to choreograph a hallucination built around my most intimate neurosis. Maybe if I wasn’t such a loner, I wouldn’t see visions. Maybe if I made more of an effort to ‘make something of myself,’ I wouldn’t be walking home alone in a small town instead of laughing and stumbling down a sidewalk with friends after an after-work happy hour got a little out of hand.

My footsteps creaked how I anticipated them to. My little house was tucked two blocks back from the river in a neighborhood full of older couples who decided to retire to a small town with fun things in walking distance. Likely no one heard me slam my door because their hearing aids were all off while they slept the sleep of folks who had a favorite postman and remembered to plant their flower bulb in the fall.

I had bought my little castle with dead parents, or at least their life insurance pay-outs and inheritance. I was surprised they left me anything, but I supposed I was their only child, and I never heard about any other family, so they probably decided it was too much of a hassle to be spiteful. Maybe they finally forgave me for escaping, realized the part they had played in our mundane family drama.

Either way, it let me run away from my life in Chicago and buy a little green house with an oak tree in the back yard. Sometimes, when I have the craving for parental advice I sit at the base of the oak and talk to it until my problems seem manageable.

I wondered if the oak would have advice on how to deal with doppelgangers.

Electricity bill in mind, I resisted the temptation to turn on every single light. I took my time, thinking if I forced myself into familiar routines and rhythms, I could control the residual fear and pack my life back inside the lines.

Decaf coffee with a generous pour of whole milk was my winding down snack. Slippers went on, though it was still warm outside, for Autumn. I pulled down all the blinds, to get rid of my view of the night outside and to avoid my reflections in the glass. This wasn’t part of the routine, but I was still unsettled. I didn’t want to see Her again. Start wondering where She got my hair from.

Pajamas went on and locks were triple checked instead of double-checked. The knobs on the were stove tapped, the faucets on every sink tightened and then it was time to crawl into bed. However, before bed, I sat crisscross applesauce in front of the gigantic antique mirror I had bought at “Ann’s Tiques” in town (an antique shop owned by a woman named Susan) which I had leaned against the wall next to my bed.

I lit incense and picked up my comb with the onyx handle (from the same antique shop). On the handle there was pearl inlay in the image of a little barn owl, just about to rest on a tree branch. Or perhaps it was about to fly away. Whichever it was, the owl’s quiet, glimmering face and dark eyes had become an old friend to me.

Every night, I took the comb, and parted my hair in a new section, one inch away from previous evening’s section. I had a little notebook that rested on the same scarf as the incense holder and comb where I kept track of which section I was on, so I didn’t double dip. To someone flipping through, it would look like I was doing a very bad job keeping track of the phases of the moon. I represented my head as a little circle, and the parts for each section as little swoops. I needed a new notebook soon, my current one was nearing the end of its lifespan, pages and pages of circles and swoops.

Once I verified which section was next, I took my owl friend and parted my hair. Then along the part, in one-inch increments (estimated, I’m not busting out the ruler, I’m not that neurotic) I pulled out a single strand of hair. I started at the hairline, the moved back to the nape of my neck. Inch by inch.

Selecting the correct hair was important. I didn’t want to pluck good hairs. I only wanted to pluck the bad hairs, which is why it was so important to run a few through my fingers before committing to the sacrificial hair. Bad hairs sometimes have split ends, or the shaft is uneven and crinkled, rough under the fingers. I overall have coarse hair, but the wrong hairs are coarser than the rest. Sometimes they’re significantly shorter than the other hairs in that section, though I have to be careful, because if it’s a hair growing back after being sacrificed, I want to let it grow – longer, stronger, better. What was ripped from the roots will grow back better. It’s a test, it’s a ritual. Me and my reflection in the dim light, smoke, and pearl.

Once a hair was plucked, I pulled out an old marble urn (from a regional flea market, not from Ann’s Tiques) out from its hiding place underneath my bed. When the urn was full, I would either bury the hair in my garbage to be taken away or, in the spring, I would leave it strung in the bushes in my yard for birds to use in their nests. I liked to think of my dishwater strands, buried in a landfill somewhere growing into oak trees, or being woven into a home by a little sparrow to keep them warm through the winter. To do better service than they did to me. It made no sense, but that is what I wished for, and I let myself savor the fantasy. I didn’t know why I hid the urn. I was the only person who ever entered this room.

I plucked one hair. Moved on, two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

I gathered them together from where I had laid them on my thigh and opened the urn to hide them away.

The urn was empty.

Yesterday, it had almost so full I had planned to take it with me on my walk to work so I could dump it in the trash on my way out. That is when I knew, with more certainly than I had ever known a single other thing in my entire life that She had my hair. I hadn’t been hallucinating, I hadn’t been mistaken, I hadn’t been projecting insanity onto some other random blonde trying to enjoy a late-night walk along the river. She had stolen my hair and was wearing it.

Still gripping the fourteen hairs between my middle finger and thumb, I put the lid back on the urn. With no idea where to put them now, I pressed them between the pages of my journal, marking which segment I had just completed, so I knew where to pick up tomorrow evening.

I’d held this ritual for four or five years now, why had She come now?

It started when I was at my old job working for a large tech company in Chicago that needed recent college grads to dupe into being treated like shit in the name of a salary. In Chicago, making anything above 50k year at 23 is opulent, I felt like fuckin’ Gatsby. Ironically enough, after six months of working at my job, I wanted someone to put a bullet through me and leave my corpse in a pool, so I was still, in a way, feeling like Gatsby.

At this company, I worked hard. I learned things about databases and groveling I never thought I would know. But no one had taught me the rules to the game. I didn’t rise to expectations, because I, at 23, 24, 25, couldn’t tread the corporate water forcefully enough, couldn’t push others under to keep myself afloat. I sunk instead.

How to cope with slowly drowning? Drink. Walk home barefoot and alone from bars in the sketchiest neighborhoods in Chicago and dare the world to enact its common patterns of violence on you. Nod and smile while people berate and blame and tear you down to get a rung above you on the ladder that has no top. Watch your friends, who work for the same company, happily tread water in the shallow end. Their confused sympathy will only push you down further – why can’t you swim, they ask? Because you were unfortunate enough to be dumped in the deep end while they were shown the steps and told to take their time.

When you have enough water in your lungs, and you’re in enough pain your thrashing starts disrupting others, the lifeguard will quietly tell you to leave. They won’t save you; they won’t blow their whistle at the people who grabbed you by your neck and shoved you deeper into the water, but they will let you know – it’s your own fault for drowning.

Your friends will attend your funeral, while deciding to start sleeping with the lifeguard who let you die. Eventually, because you know in your heart it was your fault, you should’ve been stronger, more buoyant, you decide to stop seeing your friends because you’re dead and buried and they can’t respect someone who drowned, while they smile and splash around in the waist-deep water. Why couldn’t you just swim?

It was a question that began to haunt me at work, about seven months before the end. That was when I found pulling out my hair helped and had the benefit of being less likely to leave me dead in a gutter. Alone in my office, huddled in front of my multiple monitors, I would drag my fingers through my hair over and over until I found a bad hair, and when I plucked it out, I was dragging out the bad parts of myself. It was relief, precious seconds of it. I could breathe.

I sat on the floor of my bedroom, the empty urn sitting in front of me, letting the shadows grow long. My room stayed empty, except for me and, with nothing else to do, struggling to process the events of the walk home, I picked up my hairbrush and started pull it through my hair, 93 strokes.

The next morning was beautiful, a quiet fall morning full of sunshine and leaves and that Autumnal smell all the perfumeries try to recreate and can’t. No woman in the shadows, just the morning light that turns dull brick and wood into something gilded in gold.

I arrived at the bookstore, letting myself in through the backdoor, hearing the small bell chime. Immediately one of my coworkers sailed into the backroom, summoned by the ‘ding.’

“We’ve only been open an hour, but there’s one of those old people tours down from Chicago. You know, letting the Golden Girls go shopping and get cute gifts for the grandchildren.”

“Scary, too many grandmas,” I responded, falling easily into the old grooves of the Dog-Eared Page. When the door locked behind me, I felt like I was able to shut away the outside world. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail. “So do you want me to take register?”

“No, please go out on the floor and help them find things. Listen to their stories, you’re good at that. Just let ‘em talk and carry their books; I don’t know if their bones can handle the weight of something more than a mass market Mary Higgins Clark.”

Ellie wasn’t renowned for her grace under pressure, so I quickly got out to the floor, excited to lose myself in the tourists, to tune out the voices saying I was a failure, nothing but a retail worker, that I had runaway and decided to be unimpressive in an unimpressive town and that I would never have a remarkable life. Today, I was going to put some good books in some good hands and let it be enough.

But She wouldn’t let me be.

I was holding a stack of Artemis Fowl books for someone’s mischievous ten-year-old grandson when I caught the flash of dishwater blonde go behind a bookshelf.

“May I take these up to the front for you?” I asked, stumbling over my words. The grandma probably thought either she or I was having a stroke. Without waiting for her reply, I sped towards the front of the store so I could drop off the stack of books and pursue Her.

In the back corner of the store, the light bulb had gone out a few days ago, and we were all collectively too lazy to get the ladder up from the basement to replace it. Besides, there was a window overlooking the river to let in enough natural light during the day to illuminate the book titles. But the day had become overcast and the shadows stretched too long for the morning.

I slipped between bookshelves, looking for my hair thief. I was terrified at the thought of seeing Her face, maybe the devouring maw of a ghost, maybe a faceless void, maybe finally having to look at myself, eye to eye.

But She was not hiding in the shadows, waiting to consume me, kill, me, or whatever it was that your shadow double does. My chest still grew tight, and the back of my throat tasted sour.

There was a slight noise, like someone tapping on a soft surface on the other side of the bookshelf. Unsteady, heart uncomfortable, I reached for a book and pulled it down to see through to the opposite aisle.

My height exactly, She stood, back to me. She tapped Her fingers across spines, as if looking for some specific title.

After going through a few shelves this way, She rested Her finger on a specific book, nudging it back further than the others then turned, as if to start heading deeper into the bookshelves. My hair on Her head obscured Her face. She wore the same baggy jeans, the same sweatshirt. I slid the book I’d removed back into place and went around the corner, bracing for the worst. Empty. I turned to the shelf to see what book she’d nudged. Covey, Stephen, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

I told Ellie I was sick – a sudden migraine – and bolted for home. I took the long way so I wouldn’t go along the river path. The warm-gray autumn sky that had been so picturesque this morning, welcoming me out the door, was threatening now. I tried not to look behind me, or ahead, just at my feet and occasionally a few steps ahead of them.

I still saw a gentle bounce and swirl of mousey not-brown-not-blonde hair in the reflection of a store windowfront. Around the corner, crossing the street. She kept her distance and after what felt like fifteen hours instead of minutes, I was able to fumble the keys into the lock and slam the olive-green door closed, gasping, squeezing my eyes shut so tight that I could feel my eyes pushing back into my brain.

I wished I had someone to call, but I’d plucked relationships out of my life as if they were dry and brittle split-ends. I couldn’t hack it at living a successful adult life, why would I think I could hack it at having friends? I was so tired, and they were so much work. If my un-success, failure, slow drowning was a plague, my friends were the first people I’d quarantine from. Lock myself away in a little town.

As I stumbled into my entryway, dropping my keys onto the welcome mat, I began to wonder what else I’d locked in with me.

As if I really did have a migraine, I pulled down all the blinds. I checked all the locks, turned off all the lights. In the kitchen, I took too-big gulps of cold water, letting some dribble down my chin. There was an itch in my throat, a weird scratching and pressure at the back of my mouth, almost like I’d swallowed water the wrong way, but not quite.

I coughed, which turned into gagging. Turning around I clutched the edge of the sink, knuckles going white as my whole body shook with the force of retching. An obstruction in the back of my throat. Scratching.

I reached my far fingers back into my mouth, still hunched over the sink and felt a damp mass. I hooked it with my finger and slowly dragged it out from between my lips.

A clump of hair.

Dishwater blonde.

I let it fall into the sink. Acting on more impulse than thought, I ran the hot water and scrabbled at the wall to flip the switch to the garbage disposal. I let it run for a long time, hot water and the sound of grinding filling the stillness of the house.

I’m unsure how I spent the rest of the day. I stayed in the kitchen a long time, breath catching as I reminded myself to breathe. The phantom of my hair stayed in my throat. No amount of water, tea, food, or cough drops erased the rawness, the memory of choking. For once I had a problem I could not pull out and hide away under my bed. No evaluating fingers and a slight tug could separate me from this.

I’m scared to bathe now. I can’t shower, I can’t open doors, I can’t drive my car. I expect to see Her reflection in my rearview mirror, to open my shower curtain and see Her there, watching. I expect to catch a glimpse of Her in the hall as I walk to the kitchen, expect to hear Her voice behind me waiting in line at the grocery store. She’s taken my hair, gathered up my rejected strands and woven Herself into existence to remind me that I can yank the parts of myself I hate out by the roots, but I cannot throw them away. They will always grow back.

My thoughts come unchecked, unspooling snarls, as I keep vigil on the secondhand couch, rescued from my first apartment in Chicago. I brought my blankets, notebook and comb down here to the living room, but I haven’t slept. I think back to those first years of independence. I wish I’d known what the price of succeeding was, back then. I wish I’d taken better notes on how everyone else always seemed to be so happy. Be an effective person. Do those I left behind have their own silent doubles, wearing their clothes, mocking their shadows, slowly letting mold grow over the plans they had for their lives?

A glass breaks in the bedroom upstairs. I twist the comb in my hands.

Her hands have been around my throat a long time. But here they are now, again, crushing my jaw, digging into my neck. Her face is so close to mine I can see the little vertical lines on Her lips, I can see the upturn of Her nose, I see features, I don’t see a face. I see these small, perfect elements that refuse to come together to create a whole.

Her breath is warm on my face, her teeth sharp as they bite into my cheek. Her tongue delicate as she laps up the blood. My breath is warm too, the last breath I can snatch from the air before my throat collapses under the pressure of her grip.

I want to beg, I want to sigh, I want Her to love me, I want Her to keep crushing, I want Her bite to turn into gentle kiss on my forehead and for Her to say it will be alright, I want her to take my place and let me wash away, to build a little nest I never have to leave, I want, I want, I am alive with wanting.

I hear my phone vibrating on the coffee table. As She devours me, I turn my head, expecting it to be the bookstore, the dentist’s office, the bank.

The name of my emergency contact flashes on the screen. They must be calling to figure out why so many people are calling them and expecting them to be someone else. I stretch out my fingers, reaching, wanting to answer the phone.