Flash Fiction


HAIRCUT by JL Williams

Grim orange light, his scissors. She wants him to cut her hair. She wants it. Yet there are so many distractions. The men shooting up in the corner. The gamblers mumbling and dropping change in the next room. The girl throwing up in the toilet. Smoke from marijuana and cigarettes thickens the air. None of the doors are on their hinges so everything is audible, half-visible in the hazy light. She sits in his chair with no mirror in front of her wondering where he has disappeared to. The vinyl beneath the bare skin of her thighs is hard and cracked, presses into the tender skin behind her knees. She decides to try to find him. She rises and wanders the rooms looking for the hairdresser with his big silver scissors with black handles, thinking, cut me, where are you, can’t you cut me? She can’t see anyone’s faces and there are no mirrors anywhere. Just piles of rags, half-empty rooms, stained mattresses.

By JL Williams, Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.





Flash Fiction