Competition Twenty-Nine Shortlisted: On The Wind by Karen Arnold
She cut her hair yesterday. Knotted her fingers into it, hacked at it with kitchen scissors that were too blunt for the job and the unwanted lengths fell to the bathroom floor like shed snakeskin, dry and whispery. When she had finished, a newly hatched, baby bird face looked back at her from the mirror, startled eyes and sharp bones, downy feathers of hair sticking to her skin, damp with sweat and tears. She gathered the hair and dropped it into a box full of other unwanted things, letters and birthday cards, promises and memories, things that had slowly fermented into complaint and grievance, an archive of all the ways in which she was too much or, if the wind changed, all the ways in which she was not enough.
She set fire to the box in the middle of the lawn, and the smell of burning hair filled every corner of the garden. It crept back into the house and lingered all though the evening as she sat watching the darkness fall. When a neighbour pushed a note through the door complaining about the stink from her bonfire, she took the note outside and dropped it into the embers, raising her wine glass in salute to the window of the kitchen next door.
This morning, she dyed her cropped, newly fledged hair bright blue and walked out into the sunlight, leaving the sink spattered with colour, towels damp on the floor. She walked out into the summer street, into the noise and the life of it all. The breeze stroked the back of her newly bare neck with soft fingers and told her she was beautiful.
Karen Arnold is a writer and psychotherapist . She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and story telling to make sense of our human experience. She won the Mslexia prize for flash fiction in 2022. She has work in The Waxed Lemon, The Martello,and Roi Faineant amongst others. She can be found on twitter –@Aroomofonesown4
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Tender and amusing. Loved it.