Mama hasn’t cut my hair since my turtleneck days, yet here we are in the kitchen, scissors in her hands, and a bowl of orange slices in my lap. The juice is bitter and I like it that way. I eat as Mama says something that sounds like rubber and Dad is nowhere to be found.
“The strawberry bush is large today,” she says, and I agree.
The bush has encased the backyard in shade and gnats. I see Brother climbing up the side of it. He crawls in and disappears, just like he did when he was little. Mama rants about the seeds he’ll track in, gesturing to little white blossoms stretching through the floorboards. I try my best not to sneeze as split ends tickle my nose.
Hours later, when my hair is shorter and choppier than before, Brother walks through the back door dripping red pulp.
“I saw the cat again today, the big calico,” he says as Dad grabs a towel and wipes him down. “I think she’s still looking for her daughter.”
Dad wrings out the towel into little jam jars. “Aren’t we all?”
We sit around the urn and eat yarrow stalk soup from porcelain I’ve never seen before. It tastes like sandalwood and Pacific. We eat in silence until Dad asks Brother if he’s ever been in love. Brother says it’s not polite to ask that, and Dad nods in understanding. The soup has gone cold by the time he speaks again, this time to compliment my haircut. I look at Mama, who’s smiling.
“I did what I could with the garden shears, his hair is just so thick.” She scratches the nape of my neck with affection, but I don’t feel it. I haven’t felt it since December.
Mama and Brother go outside to watch the North Dipper play chess. Dad and I are still around the urn, which is now a vase with four bluebells. He picks up the porcelain and turns it over in his hands. I see a small eye carved in the bottom. It blinks at me and I blink back, Dad shakes his head and puts it down. He’s gentle about it, though.
“You know how this conversation ends.”
I nod. He repeats himself until the breeze becomes too humid. I get up, kiss him on the forehead, and walk out the front door.
“I wish you were kinder,” is the last thing I hear before the click.
Mama is smoking cherry bark on the porch, which seems to wrap around the house for miles. I know she’s not really smoking cherry bark, but I don’t have the heart to change it.
“You’re more alike than you think,” she says.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She laughs, and against my better judgment, I laugh too. She offers me the stick, and I take it to cleanse my aura. We watch the sheep in the front yard chase the fawns. One of them, the fawns, gets caught in tangled magnolia roots. The sheep running after it lets out a cry like a human child, and a buck with horns adorned with bone and jade comes to the rescue.
“Nothing like a mother’s love,” Mama says as her eyelashes fall out. She doesn’t flinch at the sound of them hitting the deck, but I can’t stand it. I run for the field as the sheep continue to bleat with desperation.
I run until my lungs burn and my eyes sting and I’m in the middle of an orchard. I don’t notice I’m crying until a tear falls into the corner of my mouth. Blackberry floods my tongue and when I wipe my eyes, my fingers are pruned and stained. I hear shuffling and when I turn, there’s a man holding out a handkerchief. I trust him because he looks like someone I passed in a grocery store once. I take the cloth and thank him. He holds both my hands, looking for something in my palms.
“That’s the problem,” he says, tracing my knuckles. “You think marigolds and lavender mean something.”
I lean into the warmth, and the more I relax the more it stings. He runs his fingers through my hair, and every strand he touches grows down to my ribs. My shoulders bear the weight. He twirls the darkness between his fingers and looks at me with something close enough to love. I swallow and smile without teeth like Mama taught me.
“When the sun comes up, I’ll be gone.”
I cry again because I am in love with him. I feel my knees shake and he helps me to the ground. I curl into the Earth and cry as dawn melts the stars. The ground, in response, provides a pair of old sewing scissors at my feet. I take them and cut my hair even choppier than Mama did, watching the clumps turn to hyssops where they fall.
When I enter through the backdoor, Mama and Brother are in the kitchen catching dragonflies. One of them hovers between my eyes. He’s red and lucky and I want to crush him between my fingers. Something tells me this is Dad now, so I sigh and step aside. Dad the Dragonfly kisses my nose before flying up and out to the ravens waiting for him. They’ll bring him back as a man, but only if they get something out of it.
As I look out to the strawberry bush, I see a speckled cat emerge with a stained mouth. Its whiskers twitch as it sees me. It starts to convulse. The door won’t open and it doesn’t matter, the cat stares as it coughs up clumps of brown and orange. It turns to glass as it hits the ground, sending fractals all over the yard.
Ren Johnsue is a Queer writer who believes in storytelling as a form of love and poetry as devotion. His work can be found in TRANSliterate and is forthcoming in Breakbread Magazine.