by Louisa Howerow

When I was ten, my mother shaved me bald. I was not consulted. Baldness, my mother said, was a slight, temporary indignity that would ensure me my birthright -- thick wavy hair, like my father’s. I was not convinced. My hair resembled my mother’s in that it was straight and fine. I did not want to use trickery to usurp a birthright. April fool.

She took me outside, placed me on a stool and tied a coarse cotton sheet around my neck. I lifted my face, stuck out my tongue and smeared the perfect white clouds across the grey-blue sky. "Don’t wiggle, Shona. I’ll tell you a story."

I swung my legs back and forth, just once more, for good measure. "Once upon a time. . ." The shears’ two sharp blades, long metal extensions of her fingers, slid loudly past each other, traveled across my head. Clumps of black hair fell around my stool and on my lap. Fine hairs covered my face and ears, found their way inside my top, prickled my skin, but I did not tell her.

This much I know: she used dressmaking shears made in Germany. Solingen. In the fifth century, the tribes of the Rhine shaved their slaves. In the twentieth century they did, too.

Shaving a female’s head was not invented by my mother. Women have shaved or have been forced to shave their heads bald throughout history. To combat the heat in ancient Egypt, women chose to be bald. During the seventeenth century Paris prostitutes were beaten, shaved and run out of town. At the close of the Second World War my French aunt was shaved bald, as a punishment for taking a German soldier as a lover. Last December, when the winter was particularly cold, my grandniece came home, her head shaved bald. She speaks French, but I do not think that she has a German lover, though I cannot be sure. She does not consult me on such matters.

I also know this much: the skins of mammals are immersed in lime, sodium sulphide and water; a dehairing machine removes most the hairs; a dull knife scuds off the remainder. When my mother could no longer cut, she took a sharp, warm razor and scraped my head till it was pink and tender. She was careful not to cut me and I was grateful.

"It’ll all grow out. Soon enough." She swept up the hairs that had fallen at my feet, threw them into a rusty metal barrel, behind the house, and lit a match.

I, an April Arian, am ruled by the planet Mars.

That afternoon, I crept behind the rain barrel, lifted up my top and pulled down my skirt. Small black silk hairs had planted themselves into my skin. Long, fine and black, the hairs trailed from the fairy rings around my nipples, covered my belly, hung down between my legs. I brushed the hairs with my tongue till my skin tingled. I twined the hairs with ribbons and dusted them with gold and silver.

This much I also know: Hairs have neither blood vessels nor nerves, but I can will them to live or not to live.

Louisa Howerow's short stories have been published in Canadian print journals: The Amethyst Review, Room of One's Own, and The Antigonish Review. One of her short stories was a finalist in the Canadian Literary Awards Contest (1999). Short stories and poems have also appeared in on-line journals, such as E2K, Augustcutter, A Woman of a Certain Age, the-phone-book -- and now The Danforth Review!