The Precious Nature of Hair

She was fascinated by hair and would tell stories of strangers with long flowing locks that made the other girls gasp and get goose bumps.

“Your silly daydreaming is a waste of time and mental effort,” the head teacher would say. “Focus on what we tell you because we are older – we know what has come before and we know what the future holds.”

She sometimes wondered how the future would exist when the present was given little respect. If each today and tomorrow was the same, did the past, present and future exist as one never ending and continuous moment of now?

She pondered such things lying in her bunk at night, gently stroking her short spikes protruding from her skull.

Every two weeks when the morning was free of sewing and the shavers came out, she would watch the follicles falling though the light, looking at every strand and seeing each one as a unique part of something bigger that was no longer hers.

She would try and catch a falling hair or two to grow them under her pillow but the teachers caught her and began to bind her hands behind her back when she had her head shaved.

“Stop thinking simply of yourself and start thinking of the greater good” the teachers would say, as if it was something new and profound.

The girls would sew and sew again until each day was done. The hair went in the canvas sack, the canvas would be sewed shut and the hair would go in another canvas sack.

She would love plunging her hand into the sacks while the teachers were distracted. So many varieties of hair from so many varieties of people; she dreamed of the longhairs and their boats she’d heard about in whispers around the bunks.

The sacks were stacked at the end of the day by the far wall, at night the girls would listen to the trucks and the men take the sacks away.

Some girls were satisfied at the school as it meant two meals a day and a bed at night, but many harboured thoughts of running away. She would pull at her hair at night in an attempt to have it grow or stretch, anything to make it longer.

She longed for a boat of longhair travellers to take her away on a trawler or a barge or anything that could float, far away from the repetitiveness of life at the school.

When the teacher was counting the sacks, she sewed herself into one and lay very still. That night she was hauled into the back of a van and driven many miles.

After a few hours, the truck came to a stop and the men’s voices became quieter. She picked her moment, unpicked the sack and slipped out of the van into the night.

She got as far as the coast, but no further. The boats filled fast and she had no skills to offer so she was left behind, time and time again.

She found an underground bunker built into a cliff and slept there and ate biscuits wrapped in tin foil. When the biscuits ran out she ate insects that lived in the walls.

One evening she felt a series of thuds shake the bunker. She opened the heavy door to find a man lying there in great pain. He held in his hand a long piece of driftwood, sharpened to a point. She hauled him inside and splashed water on his face.

He came to life and he spouted shocking words induced by terrific fear. She calmed him down and the fear slowly eased from his eyes, as he knew he was far from the Beings.

The man had been lost at sea, a longhair escapee riding the currents in search of a better place. One night his boat struck a mining barge. He climbed aboard and found manning a large drilling tool, a tall Being - dressed head to toe in silver and white.

The man begged for something to eat and the Being reached to him, touching the man’s hair with long, graceful strokes. The man was given food - in return the Being ate his hair.

She sat back, eyes and ears open and she rubbed the spikes on her shaved head. There soon came a time for the man when his hair would not grow so the Being threw him into the ocean and the man drifted for many weeks.

The man died that night on the floor of her bunker.

She would sit facing the door with the piece of sharpened driftwood, moving only to catch insects to eat. Her hair grew longer and longer as she sat. Moments passing with such similarity they became one never-ending continuous moment of now.

Ever present, ever ready - nothing changed except her hair, which continued to grow long after the sharpened piece of driftwood fell from her hands.