Head and Tail 虎头蛇尾
Content warning: anxiety, insomnia, sex.
She was born in the year of the tiger.
When she was in grade school, she used to climb onto the horizontal bar by the side of the playground, sit on top of the metal rod, then fall back, swing all the way around, and land on her feet. She’d feel like an Olympic champion every time she pulled off this gymnastic trick, which could have broken her fingers, limbs, or even neck. But she found it worthwhile, seeing the world in 360 degrees, if only in a flash, and feeling the whirl, the vertigo, and the highness that came with it.
Then came a particularly windy day. She spent some extra time adjusting her balance before the flip. The leaves above her were rustling. Her fleshless child butt was hurting against the slightly quivering rod. There was also this boy eyeing her in the distance. None of these registered much in her mind, or so she thought. It was just the bar, the ground, and herself, in this vast world, simple as that. So she fell back and landed on the ground, but with a sidestep. Her shirt, worked loose from her trousers up on the bar, was all over her face, leaving her belly and chest exposed. Blinded and chilled, she wiped the cold sweat off her face with her flipped shirt. She had seen shirtless boys — they looked exactly the same as her, with their flat chests and timid nipples. So she wasn’t bothered at all by her nudity, only by having nearly lost her balance.
That was when she heard a joyous laugh, which she mistook for a girl’s because it sounded quite sweet. She saw the boy looking at her with a big smile on his face not far away. She tucked her shirt back in, walked right up to him, and stared for a few seconds. She was taller, so she looked at his short hair at first, which seemed like a freshly mowed lawn, while he was mostly looking at her lips. She could hear his breaths tensed, and the efforts to hide them. Eventually, he looked up a little, and she saw his pupils dilating like an octopus just inked. She rolled her eyes and turned around so abruptly that her ponytail slapped his face. Years later, after they had all graduated, she heard that the boy had a crush on her, and that her hair had stung almost as much as a skipping rope's lash on a missed jump, because her hair was so long, black, hard, and thick, straight throughout with a slight curl at the tip, the way a man would want his dick to be.
During puberty, the volume of her hair had made it so easy to hoard and hide her own sweat and grease, and the dust she gathered navigating the streets. It was the same inevitable process of a thickly bristled broom gradually getting itself entangled with dirt, debris, hair, and its own breaking branches, through all its swiping across the floors.
Her mother would wince at the smell of her head, and order her to spend proper time in the shower: Stay in there. Apply everything: the shampoo, the conditioner, the hair mask. Take your time to let them sink in. Massage carefully. Not just play with the bubbles! When you come out, I’ll be able to tell. It’s a privilege to be able to keep your long hair. If you don’t care for it like a good girl, we might as well just cut it.
So she always stayed in the stall until her fingers were as wrinkled as the face of the old man in the park, whom she passed every day as she cycled home from school. He was always there at dusk, practicing calligraphy on the paving stones, with a huge sponge-tipped brush and a bucket of water. As he sidestepped to find more room, the characters behind him faded in the setting sun, and she thought, “Here stands one whose passion is writ on water.”
While waiting for all those products to perform their cleansing and restoring magic, she would comb the ends of her hair together and use it to write out on the misty bathroom window the poems they had to learn by heart for class. Yes, she practiced calligraphy too, with a brush she thought was made of wolf hair, but later found out came from weasel tails. What was she even thinking? They couldn’t possibly raise and fleece a pack of wolves the way they do sheep.
By the time she arrived at the line “小轩窗，正梳妆,” she couldn’t make out the beginning anymore. The vapor had touched up the window again, and somehow, as if it had crept into her mind in a similar fashion, she lost awareness for a brief moment. She couldn’t recall the rest of the poem, nor did she understand what she was doing. She just stared at the strand of her hair, and out of the blue, swept her teary face with it, like powdering with a makeup brush. She smiled because the tickling feeling cheered her up.
Despite all these efforts, she still had to get a haircut from time to time, a process she always found uncomfortable and self-defeating to sit through and understand. They would start by getting rid of all the oil her own scalp excreted and end by applying the in-house kind. They would suggest thinning her hair out and, as a final touch, blow-drying it to create the look of fuller volume. They would cut off the split ends, iron out her natural curls only to curl her hair another way. They would admire how shiny and pitch black her hair was, and then pitch to bleach it.
Hairdressing had its own sophisticated philosophy: layers were important. So was the curve of each strand. They would add texture to the otherwise boring mess, hide the angular and uneven contour of her head, so that her face would seem small and oval, like a peeled boiled egg, with the smooth line running from her forehead past her temples and cheeks to her jaw.
Clippers always confused her. As they cleared out the stray hairs at her nape, she’d feel this tingling thrill flashing through her spine, the kind one got from heavenly music. But the sound they made only reminded her of buildings being bulldozed into ruins. Her entire body would freeze for fear of getting her own skin caught up inside the grinder and minced into ground meat, should she fail to contain the shivering.
That terror, among others, kept her up at night. Sleep had always escaped her. She had no recollection of how it all happened, despite going through it countless times. It was like playing hide-and-seek with a faceless faun. She never truly found him, never truly confronted him, never stared right into his eyes. Sleep would dawn on her as night fell, after they were both exhausted from chasing each other's tails. He would walk right up to her and blow his pipes. Instead of music, bubbles would float up and burst in front of her in a deadening silence. To avoid the splash, she would shut her eyes, and then find herself bathed in the morning light.
The older she got, the more mastery she gained, so it took longer and longer to finish each game, whether she was the one chasing after or running away. She would also find more and more hair on her pillowcase, and gave up clearing it away on a daily basis. She imagined herself treading through trees as she lay amidst the hair-strewn sheets. If the chase tired her, she’d pluck a hair, pinch it between two fingernails, and slide them down to the tip. The hair would then twist in such a dramatic way that if she collected a bunch of them together, her grandma could use them like steel wool to scrub the leftovers off a dish.
Alas, her hair is no longer what it was. Years of conditioner have softened it; years of styling have damaged it; and years of sleepless nights have thinned it. The ends of her hair used to stand straight on their own when she held them upwards, reaching for the sky like the flame of a burning torch, but now they just lower their heads and take a courteous bow, and rest on the back of her neck like hibernating invertebrates as soon as her hands let go.
All those memories flash at the back of her mind, as she kneels between his thighs, waiting for him to unzip. She can’t shake off the feeling that her hair has been suffering from erectile dysfunction, with his hard cock in front of her eyes, slapping her face not in a rude way but rather gently, more like she is the one caressing it with her cheeks, the way a cat rubs itself against the leg of a desk. He enjoys seeing her ponytail wiggling in sync with his man tail from higher up. He can hear her breaths breaking, and the efforts to exaggerate them into a melodious staccato. Occasionally, she will look up a little, observe his pupils swallowing his light iris, becoming as dark as hers. He will then part her hair lovingly, so it won’t get in the way of him appreciating her full face. He sees her, and knows her, with her mouth full, throat gagged, no word uttered. She says nothing even after the act. At the end of the day, she smooths the cream onto her face. It promises to make her glow, her skin supple, with its chemical smell and sticky gel.
She was born in the year of the tiger.
She is now slithering on his body like a snake.
Edited by Opus 5.5