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20100827-last-night-i-was-thinking-of-you-by-laura-bramon-goodIt is last night, many nights and years ago, a night when I drank a glass of wine and then I cut my hair.

The wine I drank from the fat bulb of a fine crystal wine glass—the finest glass we owned, one of a wedding gift pair, against which all cheap plates and plastics looked pale and unreal. I held the glass in one hand as I lay reading in the white-washed cave of our basement apartment, stroking the glass with a finger: seeing the clear moisture wick down when the wine swirled and settled, seeing the print of my lips—no color, only skin—feathered on the rim.

“Do you remember,” I asked my husband, but as I spoke I remembered that he had gone outside to talk on the phone, and I forgot what it was I wanted to ask him. He had stepped from the basement to stand under the deck of the house above us, leaving me alone in the dim dark, the wine glass in my hand—now balanced, stem through fingers, with the bulb like a baby’s head in my palm.

The book open in my other hand was slick and pale green, a modern copy of a slim hard-back my mother always kept: The Golden Key. Last night, many nights ago, all I could remember was that the book was the fairytale of Mossy, a boy who found the golden key, and Tangle, a girl whose fate was to go with him in search of its lock.

I remembered, too, that on their journey Mossy and Tangle grew old quickly and mysteriously, their faces shadowy and their bodies hunched in the pen and ink drawings, and they lost each other in a terrible parting. As a child I never finished the book—afraid, I think, that the last pages would not bring comfort.

But last night, the little basement apartment was hot and my hair itched at the back of my neck, and somehow the story was there to hide me, to keep me from a simple task that the heat of the day and the wine had made to feel unappealing, impossible.

It was there to cover me as I listened to my husband’s voice: laughing, murmuring; agreeing, stony. I recognized the same sounds he had made during our recent deliberations: fighting sometimes, waiting. We had been talking about children: now, soon, never. Every baby surprised my mother—unplanned, unknown until she woke up one morning with bitter spit and soft breasts. There has been some empty but real relief in believing that we can fix the time.

My mind was with his voice and these memories, but with the story, too. As I read I had the sense of walking from those worries into the rooms of a house I had known and forgotten: I knew somehow that Tangle’s journey back to Mossy would take her to the Old Man of the Sea and the Old Man of the Earth.

And even before he lifted his hand, I had an eerie sense that the baby, the Old Man of the Fire, would place his cool palm on her heart so she could walk safely through the earth’s fire core. He was the one who set her on the path to the land from where the shadows fall. That was Mossy and Tangle’s dream, to find that land, because in the moment they fell in love, they were wading through and marveling over that land’s sea of shadows: of trees, at first, then birds, children, lovers; half-man, half-winged creatures.

My husband’s voice was gone as I walked back to the bathroom, wine glass balanced in my hand, and stooped to pull from between the sink and old radiator a book with drawings and instructions on how to cut hair: the book my mother had propped on the kitchen counter while she cut my father’s hair and I, a child, watched from the floor, half-glad and half-jealous of their love.

As a child, I had stolen this book away and examined the illustrated male and female figures, nearly unisex in their slim forms, the male brow broader and the female torso planted with sketched shadows of breasts. Last night, I barely looked; I flipped through the pages and ran cool water over my hands, slapping them through my short hair until my bangs and neck fringe were dripping and dark.

I took a last drink and set the wine glass down on the edge of the vanity. It watched the room like a small mirror, everything faintly blue and distended in its eye, and I wondered where my husband had gone.

I missed your voice, real and waiting, and looked up into the streaky mirror to see my face turned, for a moment, to the odd angle that made it a stranger’s.

Could I have imagined this night was coming: standing at another vanity in another room, sweeping my hair back and seeing its deep color against my sallow skin, sudden proof that I had aged and that your absence sped this progression? I could not.

I slid my fingers down to the end of the wet fringe of my bangs, turned full to the mirror, and the stranger’s face was gone. It was only mine, and I cut.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: Laura Bramon Good

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