Here’s something I just wrote like three seconds ago. Miriam’s one of the Anointed. She’s a rival to the main character, Shiloh. So far, Miriam’s been growing more and more distant from her mom, who’s in this perpetual depression since her husband skedaddled. Things are about to get bad.
Miriam’s mom was weary. She’d never been beautiful: her face was too round, and she didn’t have much in the way of chin. She’d always had her hair, though, this wavy onyx she’d had since she was squirted worldward. It’d always been long. On the wedding pictures that were still packed tight over all the walls, the stuff was down past her waist. And that’s how it was for as long as Miriam could remember, while things were still good, anyway.
The first time she remembered her mom getting her hair cut was the day after the divorce finalized. She overheard her dad say something creepy to Mom about how she was pretty good in bed and he wished they’d done it one more time. Turns out he’d been cheating on her most of the time they’d been married, mostly with one of Mom’s coworkers at the salon. The harlot still worked there.
The next day, Mom got said harlot to cut her hair since, Miriam figured, it was poetic. Mom still kept some of the clippings in an unmarked ziploc bag at the back of her jewelry drawer. Mom didn’t know Miriam knew about them, but she did. She saw Mom with them pulled out, pinching them between thumb and forefinger, examining them in the ringlight of the makeup mirror and bawling like she was going through it all over again.
Mom’s hair never got longer than that. She got it cut shorter every time. Dad got harlot pregnant, and she started working part time at the salon. Then Dad got a job in Cincinnati, and harlot didn’t really hear from him anymore. She confided this to Mom one day while she was cutting Mom’s hair even shorter. Mom kept the kid a lot. She felt responsible for it: the harlot had lined up the abortion at Dr. Bobobobo’s clinic, but Mom wasn’t having any of that; she talked her out of it with tears and promises. So now the harlot found Jesus, or so she said, and joined the pentecostals down the street and started speaking in tongues, or so she said. Mom always looked at her out of the corner of her eye.
And when, tonight, Mom asked Miriam who she wanted to take care of her in the unfortunate and unexpected event of her death, Miriam noticed her hair was even shorter yet again. She looked like a boy now, a boy with thin grey streaks and wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. She never wore makeup anymore. She sat at the mirror every morning surrounded by the stuff, but she never seemed to be able to bring herself to application.
“Did you get another hair cut?”
“Yeah,” Ms. Tolstoy says. “Bambi did it for me.” Bambi is the (ex-)harlot’s name. “Do you like it?”
“It’s short,” Miriam says.
Ms. Tolstoy shrugs. “It’s out of my way. And, besides, who do I have to impress?”
Miriam frowns. Ms. Tolstoy sees it. She can’t think of anything to say. She presses.
“So who do you want? I’m making a will.” She rattles the papers she’s got on the desk to prove the point.
“Aren’t you a little young for that?”
“You can’t be too careful,” Ms. Tolstoy says. She stares in the mirror like she’s going to find something out. The ringlight halos her pupils.
Miriam thinks a bit. “I guess I’d want Rockwell to take of me.”
“You mean Miss Rockwell.”
“Right.”
“You can’t forget to be polite,” Ms. Tolstoy says. She reaches for eyeliner but can’t wrap her fingers around it. “It’s good her husband died. I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” Miriam says.
“Sorry. I’m being morbid again.”
“It’s okay. I understand. How’ve you been sleeping?”
“Not so good.” Ms. Tolstoy sighs. “Dr. Wadlington prescribed me some new pills for it. Would you mind picking them up on your way home? The prescription’s on the table.”
“Sure. No problem.”
Miriam grabs the papers on the way out. She looks up at the wedding pictures, sees Mom grinning with that long hair like gushing crude, hears her scribbling down a signature on the will in the bedroom. Then things are quiet, and Miriam feels like Mom’s waiting for her to leave. She does. She closes the door quietly and doesn’t turn on the radio in the car. Miriam prays for her the whole way to school, but she gets the feeling it’s not going to work.