by Blair Hurley
Her great-grandmother, so she’s been told, lost many children. They were Kansas people, prairie people, who lived in a remote dust-battered town and worshiped in a bare whitewashed church, the singular steeple the tallest thing around for miles. They were Christian Scientists.
Going through her great-grandmother’s things in the hot attic of their old house, dense with golden hovering dust, she finds a framed board of hairwork with the Bible verse “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him” and the elaborate, swooping structures of woven baby hair, knotted and combed and curled into rosebuds, daisies, stars, and snowflakes. The hair has lost some of its luster, but it still has some of its original smooth texture. When she lifts the board from its frame and touches the piece, the hair still feels like the fine down of a baby.
“It’s creepy,” Dan tells her. “Do we have to keep it?”
“I can’t just throw it away. It’s the hair of my ancestors.”
“Not your ancestors. That hair all comes from babies. Babies who—” Dan pauses, realizing he’s gone too far down a bad path. Babies who died. The last word is in an unspoken whisper.
“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? But death, you know, was different back then.” Their babies were like kittens or lambs. Some made it, some didn’t.
“Why don’t you put it in the antique room?” Dan suggests, gently.
When they inherited the house, a Victorian from the previous century, and decided not to sell it, they knew they were taking on a project. In the back, up the servant stairs, they’re in an old unfinished room crammed with her great-grandmother’s furniture. Gradually, as they put off renovating it, they started stuffing their own things in there. It was now full of LPs, hole-ridden armchairs, and her grandmother’s sewing table with the Singer sewing machine built into the top. They were the sorts of things you didn’t want to think about every day, but that looked too old and precious to throw out.
She puts the picture on top of a stack of old newspapers and tries to forget about it.
* * *
Hairwork as a craft or an art form was popular in the Victorian period, she learns during an internet search. It was part of the era’s morbid fascinations, part of the way grieving women set themselves to a task with finicky demands and impossible emotional depths. She reads more about the practice in an old book that she finds at the library, The Art of Hair Work: “Persons wishing to preserve and weave into lasting mementos, the hair of a deceased father, mother, sister, brother, or child, can also enjoy the inexpressible advantage and satisfaction of knowing that the material of their own handiwork is the actual hair of the loved and gone” (Campbell 1989).
Two years ago, they lost a child. That baby lived three days and never cried; her lungs were like little folded origami cranes that never properly opened. She regrets, now, that she didn’t save the infant’s hair. The locks would’ve been the only thing, besides her bones, that would still be intact centuries from now. Instead, the child is nothing but ash.
They have another baby now, a bright, kicking boy they have named Louis. After many hours of tears, she and Dan had curled up on the couch like cats, and they had agreed that they would not make more of this than what it was and try again in due time. After all, in her great-grandmother’s time, children were like lambs. Some of them didn’t make it. You were bored up with tragedy but lived on, and in the photographs of her unsmiling relatives, with the children gathered stiffly on the porch, there were ghost children there too. Their mothers and fathers did not let it destroy them.
* * *
She wants to hang the hairwork in their bedroom, over the dresser. It’s something beautiful that one of her relatives made by hand, and the art of women has been endlessly discounted. So many family quilts and embroidered pillows were stuffed into dusty attics somewhere, living out their lives unnoticed. When her boss at the small museum where she works in curation says that they cannot create a new collection around women’s art because there is not enough to draw from, she will point this out to Dan as evidence that they should display it.
Dan objects at first. The grieving of one time, one culture, will always seem morbid or grotesque to another. And he is afraid of her, in these aftertimes, with their new baby sleeping in a bassinet by their bed. He doesn’t know what is swirling inside her, whether she will shatter into a hundred pieces or unleash a storm on the flat, featureless plain of their marriage. They’ve both woken in the night to see the other leaning over the bassinet, watching the baby breathe. Each time, they have turned over to let the other have their moment in the night. Both of them are holding their breath, waiting for disaster.
* * *
In the night, when it’s late enough that the shadows of car headlights have stopped washing over the walls (she lies awake until this time comes), she hears the hairwork whispering. She’s not sure what it’s saying, the glass muffling the words. The voices rasp on and she listens the way a mother would.
“Did you hear something last night? Somebody whispering?” she asks Dan in the morning.
He shakes his head. But the little hair roses over the dresser are not his kin the way they are hers. She wonders if DNA could be extracted from them, if a clone of a long-lost great-aunt could be created from something so little.
In the night, the whispering comes again. She has to know what they’re saying, what hidden message of grief they have to give her. If she could only get one word of blessing, some understanding of what has happened to her, she thinks that she will be all right, that she will be able to move on. She moves across the bed, crawling lightly over the sleeping form of her husband. (How can he sleep like this, so healthy and content?) She carefully removes the picture from the wall, unwinding the ancient rusting wire at the back. She must free the hair from the glass to understand what it’s asking of her.
Listen, they say. We want the hair.
From the baby? she thinks. The baby girl is ash. Ash they scattered from a ferry boat into the Charles River. The baby is gone, and she thinks sometimes that she would be happier, her marriage would be happier, that they would be able to survive this if nothing was left of her, not even the memory. But the hairwork will not let her forget.
The rosebuds rustle and whisper, their strands sliding against each other.
* * *
She is quite sure she cut all her hair in one quick, wicked snip. After pregnancy and birth, it’s thin and paltry, and one day she gathered it between her finger and thumb in one sleek, fragile handful and cut. But now she finds a single hair several inches longer than the rest. It is thicker and darker than her regular hair, almost wiry, like a pubic hair or a bit of piano wire. She can only find it when she gathers all of her hair together in her fist, the way she has taken to doing early in the morning before Dan wakes. The one black hair has a stark strangeness to it, and in the morning she holds her scissors over it. Her hand hovers for a moment, and then she puts the scissors away. For some reason, she can’t bear to cut it.
The hair is growing longer and faster than the rest of her hair. It’s halfway down her back now. She has to coil it around her ponytail a few times to bind it up. Other times she lets it trail down her back, feeling the tiny secret sensation of it brushing the back of her neck throughout the day while she changes diapers and walks up and down the hallway, singing nonsense songs and nursery rhymes she only half remembers. No one else notices, she’s quite sure. It’s only a single hair, after all. In a strange way, she’s come to think of it as her hair, even though the rest is hers as well. But the rest is so thin and fragile after her pregnancies. The unsmiling Russian hairdresser with two children lifts her lank hair and lets it fall with a sigh.
“Children take everything from us,” she says.
The hairdresser does not find the black hair. She wove it around and around and back in on itself, then hid it at the nape of her neck behind the others.
Fundamentally, she’s felt what it’s like for every part of her to not be solely hers now—her blood, the calcium in her bones—but this one hair is. When the baby is draining her breast, sucking and pulling noisily, she reaches up and twirls the hair idly around her finger. It gives her a strange comfort.
When she’s leaning over the changing table, Louis finds the black hair with his grasping hands and gives it a yank. It doesn’t come out, but she feels the tug like an electric jolt to her nerves, right on the top of her head. She screams out loud. Louis is startled for a moment, then starts to cry. She holds him and rocks him, shushing and whispering, but part of her is very scared, very frightened at the thought of losing the hair. The baby’s cries are an alien noise to her.
Later, she explores the hair frantically with her fingers, testing its strength. She’s proud of its resilience. She winds it tightly and securely around her fingers, tighter and tighter, until her fingertips turn white.
The baby cries again in the other room. She lets him cry for a minute longer, watching her fingers pale, unwinding the hair, then seeing the blood bloom into them again.
* * *
At night, the hairwork falls. Maybe the cat jumped up on the dresser, shuddering it free from its hook. Maybe it worked itself free of its own volition, making its suicide leap. She hurls into wakefulness at the bright sound of shattering glass. Dan is already staggering up. The picture frame is on the floor, glass everywhere, and a few of the hair loops are splayed loose from their old brittle wires.
Together, they sweep the glass and search the corners for the glint of glass shards.
“Remember when Louis was laughing today at something you said?” Dan asks her. His hands are steady, sweeping shards into the dustpan. “What was it that you said, again?”
“I don’t remember,” she answers. She licks her finger, presses it to the tiny pieces of glass to pick them up.
“What do you remember?” Dan asks. “Anything about what he did today? He was so funny when he—”
“I’m not sure.”
He touches her hand, stills its searching motion across the floor. “I’m getting the feeling that—”
“That what?”
“I don’t know how to say it. That you don’t love him.”
She forgets to swipe the glass off her finger before she licks it again. She feels the sudden hard brilliance of a tiny piece of glass on her tongue. If she swallows it, will it cut her from the inside out? She has already has a cut inside her, or that’s what it feels like, anyway. She swallows. Waits.
“Did you hear me?” Dan asks.
“I heard you.”
“You’re not . . . I don’t know who you are anymore.”
He rises, gives her a pat on the shoulder, and she feels him leaving before he has fully left the room.
* * *
We need the hair, the broken hairwork whispers. It’s lying on a table waiting to be fixed, its inner workings still exposed.
Louis hasn’t been sleeping well. He’s been waking every two hours to nurse. She crouches over the edge of the bed with her breasts hanging down, hot and full and aching. She has never felt more like an animal. With the first baby, her milk came in two days later, and she felt like her body was haunted by her absence, possessed by a ghost who could still demand milk from beyond the grave.
We need the hair, the hairwork whispers again.
“No,” she says. By accident, she says it out loud. Dan stirs in the bed beside her.
Then give us something else, the hairwork whispers. The baby.
“No!” she says, louder this time.
Now Dan is up. “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”
The baby is content, sucking hard. Sometimes he bites down on her nipple and she gasps from the pain. Dan assumes this is what happened, that it’s naturally how these things work. She doesn’t tell him that she has thought that the other baby would never have hurt her this way.
“I’m fine,” she says, a little breathlessly. He rolls back into sleep, so talented at refinding it instantly. She has another twenty minutes or so left of this to go, and she is afraid of the dim room, afraid of the hours to go until morning, afraid of the hair, which is now as long as she is tall.
* * *
There are things that she remembers about the baby girl who died. Her long, blinking eyelashes and her frowning, unimpressed little face, so like her great-grandmother in photographs. She is afraid to remember more, though. Any more and she’ll enter into dangerous territory that she can’t come back from.
On the internet she gets advertisements for lifelike baby dolls, hideously expensive things that are custom made based on photographs. Women who have lost babies order them, swaddle them, rock them, take selfies with them. She imagines herself as an animal who is given a crude decoy to ease the pain of its loss. Like an animal, the world thinks that a decoy will help stop her from trying to steal someone else’s baby or going mad with grief.
Looking at her healthy baby boy in the dark, she has the thought that maybe he is one of these lifelike doll decoys. Maybe her husband ordered one for her because he thought she needed it. She strokes his head a little too vigorously to wake him up and make him cry. That’s the only way she can be sure.
* * *
Her oldest friend comes by the next day while Dan goes to work. Maybe her friend called her while she was in the neighborhood. Maybe her friend knew that she was needed due to some ancient friend instinct. She can’t now remember why.
She moves around the house, clucking to herself and gathering up laundry strewn here and there. Her friend has two small children, so she understands these things.
“Oh, it was worse when I had my second,” her friend says cheerfully. “I thought my brain was leaking out through my ears.”
The baby is in a sling on her chest, mercifully asleep. “Have you ever—” she hesitates.
“Have I ever what? Lay it on me, honey. Nothing is too embarrassing.” Her friend is frank and wise. With her friend’s first stomps of her snowy boots on the tile, she felt tremendous relief; some much-needed sanity had stepped into the house.
“Have you ever heard voices telling you to do things?” She realizes how it sounds. “Not all the time. I’m not psychotic. Just . . . when I’m tired, in the middle of the night—”
Her friend puts a hand on her arm. “This too shall pass,” she says. Though it’s not really an answer. She adds, with a faux breeziness, “What are they telling you to do?”
“Ha, well, it’s funny.” She sways, trying to couch what she’s saying as lightly as possible. “They want me to cut my hair.”
“Your hair?”
“It’s this old thing of my great-grandmother’s. I think it’s freaking me out.” She reaches for the picture on the dresser. But she has misjudged the weight of Louis on her chest and overcorrects, and suddenly she is falling. She twists violently onto her hip to spare the baby. She crashes down painfully, but everyone is okay. In the commotion of getting up, the picture is forgotten.
Later, though, when her friend is putting on her coat, she tells her, “You’ve lived through something I haven’t. It must be incredibly difficult.”
“Mothers do. All the time.” She is determinedly cheerful.
“Sure. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t sad. And maddening. Just don’t listen to any voices.” Her hand on her wrist is gentle. But there’s that implied word, crazy. There are so many stories of mothers driven mad by grief. She thinks of Mary Todd Lincoln attending seances and shooting spirit photography, hoping to capture the ghostly afterimage of her lost child in the developing film. Finally, Mary was sent to the madhouse. That is the inevitable destination of irrational thinking on your life. She’s afraid she might cry. After months and months without being able to cry, suddenly she is afraid her world might be drowned in tears.
“This one needs you now,” her friend says, touching the downy hair on Louis’s head.
Then her friend is gone, leaving her in the too-quiet house. It’s getting dark and she is afraid to be alone with the baby. She puts him down in the crib and sits on the stairs the way she once did as a much younger girl, finding the only safe place in her house full of yelling. The place where she existed in that invisible between space that was neither up nor down. It was her reprieve place, where she could be nothing for as long as she needed it, and then return to the world by her choice.
* * *
Last night Dan said, “I can tell you haven’t bonded. You’re still thinking about the other one. But this is the real one, okay? This one is alive.”
But why can’t they both be real? She can almost see them, standing side by side, one just a little taller than the other. Their hair flies in the wind as they run across the lawn, leaning in to tell each other secrets. They could have been so close as brother and sister. She always longed for a sibling. Why does time demand we move on from one branching path, one that might have been? How did all her stern-looking ancestors keep pressing the bodies of their children to their breasts while thinking of the ones that weren’t there?
There are these anthropological studies in her work that declare that life was once cheap, that “attachment” and “bonds” did not form when death was so common. How in many cultures, babies weren’t even given a name until they had survived their first year. To assume that these women mourned the way we do is projecting our contemporary selves down through the ages. Maybe they prayed and found comfort in their stories of the immortal soul. When the Fox sisters conducted the first seance that would make them famous, a traveling minister had passed by their homestead in upstate New York, and all the minister wanted to know was if his departed daughter was happy in heaven. What a burst of joy, of relief, that he must have felt when he heard the single knocked answer meaning yes.
Maybe they made different bargains with themselves in order to survive. Maybe a ghost or a demon or a sinister god made them a deal.
* * *
Her one black hair, which was so tightly bound up during her friend’s visit, is sagging loose now, uncoiling itself down her back. She didn’t notice, but it must have been unspooling during the visit as they moved from room to room.
It’s as long as the hallway, spilling down the stairs even farther. It’s impossibly strong. It’s so fine she can only catch it in glimpses; its sheen is there, turning a corner, coiling and kinking and looping around. There’s no end to it. She can feel all along its length, the live wire of it spilling through the house, always bringing a thread of pain and excitement with it.
Then she feels something somewhere in the house: something is tugging on the hair. It sends a jolt through her body from the tiny focal point on the top of her head and all the way down her spine.
The baby is somewhere in the house, tugging on the hair.
She races into the bedroom. The baby is sleeping in his crib, so sweet and still. The hair loops in and out of his room, untouched. But as she watches, it grows taut. Sliding over the crib railing, it tightens as it loops around the open door. The electric jolt reaches her head again.
She follows the almost invisible thread, seeing where it has looped around the banister, spiraling down the stairs. Her feet fly across the floor. The hair is sawing around a corner, moving up and down as someone tugs on it, jerking her head every time she moves. She gathers it up as she goes, a tangled ball growing in her hand. In the kitchen she catches glints of it wrapped around pot handles.
It’s tight going up the back stairs, up through the servants’ quarters of this old house, up to the little back room. They haven’t renovated this part of the house and they normally choose to forget its state of decay by closing the door. There are bare boards and dangerous exposed nails that the hair twines and twists around. The attic room is stuffed with old antiques, the rickety sewing chairs and old wooden tables she inherited from her great-grandparents. They hoped, one day, to restore them so they could use them again.
And there she is, perched on an antique child’s chair, doll-sized, perfect for her. The last time she saw this little girl, she was only three days old, her eyes shut, her lips gray. But somehow, she recognizes her at once. The little girl has grown, becoming more mature, more herself, in the attic, and somehow, she didn’t notice. Her baby girl has been living here all this time.
The little girl looks up when she enters the dark room. Little wisps of curls bounce around her ears. Her eyes catch the light from the hallway. She looks like a feral thing who has learned to live on her own.
In her hand is the black hair. It’s taut. She gives it another gentle tug, and from all the places in the house where it has been caught, too tangled for her to gather, the hair slides, and her head jolts.
“That’s mine,” she says. “That’s Mommy’s.”
The baby girl looks at her, not understanding. But she’s not a baby anymore, she is a little girl. She’s suddenly all the ages she could have been, all the ages she imagined she could be, where she is cunning and cruel and kind. She raises her little hand, the black hair shining in the dust-moted light of the room. If she loses this hair, what will become of it? Her grief will become something that’s tied into a ribbon, put under glass only to dull with each passing year. It will no longer be alive.
“No,” she sobs. “Don’t.”
The little girl cocks her head. And then they both hear it; on the other side of the house, Louis is crying. She listens for a long moment. His cries climb up and down an octave, warbling and sweet and aching with need. Her great-grandmother’s sewing machine is close by, and beside it is the cunningly hand-built chair, whose seat contains a hidden compartment with neatly stored bobbins, pins, and spools of thread in every color. She flips up the seat and digs inside the chair for the shears, holding them up in both hands like a sword. The shears are such a tempting toy. The little girl grabs for them. She jerks back. “No, no, I can’t.” And then they’re wrestling, one trying to cut, one trying not to cut. The shears close with a clean, vicious sound—a sound like no other.
Bibliography
Campbell, Mark. The Art of Hair Work: Hair Braiding and Jewelry of Sentiment with Catalog of Hair Jewelry. Edited by Caethe and Jules Kliot. Lacis Publications, 1989.
Blair Hurley is the author of The Devoted, which was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her second novel, Minor Prophets, was published in 2023. Her work is published in New England Review, Electric Literature, The Georgia Review, Guernica, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her story “The Telepathist” was listed as a “Distinguished Story” in Best American Short Stories 2022. She is a Pushcart Prize winner and an ASME Fiction Award finalist.