Cross & Quill

It is the type of hair that never turns gray. It just begins fading gradually from its natural strawberry blonde color, as though the divine painter keeps adding more and more white to the palette, until one day in the future when the white consumes it all. It is hair that has suffered through the trends of many decades. It has been ironed, ratted, crimped, bleached, chopped, shaved, feathered, frayed, bobbed, air dried, curled, layered, permed, straightened and blow-dried. It has been shaped into beehives (only once, for senior prom), ponytails, French braids, Dutch braids, bouffants, and some sort of tangled nest-like style created by her daughter's tiny, awkward hands, which on occasion curiously poked at the scars ("Mommy, does that hurt? What about that?").
It has been hidden under hats, scarves, and bandannas. It is hair that has endured a lifetime of hardships. It has been yanked, jerked, tugged, and ripped clean out over the years--first by her brother, then her husband. It has been shaved off twice--once at her mother's hands ("If you scream one more time..."), the other by emergency room doctors after the beating that convinced her to move on for the sake of the new life inside of her.
It has been used successfully and unsuccessfully as a device for attraction. It has been neglected, mistreated and abused. It has been tinged as long as she can remember with a lingering odor of cigarette smoke--a product of the casino where she spends much of her day, serving drinks to strangers with wandering hearts. It has been stroked by her daughter's loving hand, small and delicate; her ex-husband's deceitful one, the coarseness of which frequently snagged in her hair; and by strangers' greasy, fumbling hands that she cannot slap away because every tip counts. It has been styled meticulously everyday as required for her night job as a cocktail waitress at the casino, then--already brittle from all the hairspray--twisted tightly and shoved into a hairnet for her job at the restaurant where she works graveyard so she can send her daughter to college where she will learn to make smart decisions and will never have to know the feeling of hair being torn in clumps from her scalp.