Keeper

Girl, 9, Secretly Snips a Lock of Another Student’s Hair

16 Girl, 9, Secretly Snips a Lock of Another Student’s Hair She sees its color is like shouting, like singing in church when all the notes shoot skyward. And layered, like a lake, dusky underneath where sun won’t go, where her toes might touch bottom or float apart from her, vanish into fish, lily, dark. This girl is not her friend, but her hair could be, it is so much, generous as pears in a backyard garden before sparrows pock and scar them, scatter their gutted husks . . . and it’s her hand reaching now for one wisp, such a smallness that could, with luck, help her step into some elsewhere— like letters ghosting the sides of city buildings, when just the wing of sewing starts machines whirring in her head: she knows it only takes a little, and it’s her hand reaching the scissors from inside her desk—she sees it far off, shimmering, but it’s her hand and not like dying—what she knows from books, squashed squirrels, her grandmother’s whittling down—but more like waking on a snow day, her feet warm where they rub together near the bed’s end, out her window the parked cars’ edges softened, swallowed, and even 17 in its highest branches where she can never go, the thin oak holding what’s fallen up to the blank sky that gives permission, makes possible. ...