Falling by Anne Simpson Page A

tattoo of two small oak leaves at the back of his neck.
    What you’ve got is a machine working at sixty revolutions per second, injecting ink under the skin. See this – beautiful, huh? Puss ’n Boots. Hey, Tarah, get your ass out here. Tarah does the tattoos.
    A hand parted the beaded curtain neatly, as if it were dividing air. It was such a delicate hand. A hand that could part the waters of the Red Sea. But, no, it was a different hand, belonging to a girl with short hair that was dyed magenta. She had black sleeves laced to her black bodice. She was tiny, and for all her tattoos and triple-pierced lip, she looked like a wren with a broken wing.
    What? she said flatly.
    We got everything under the rainbow, said the man. You ask Tarah.
    D’you want something? she asked Damian.
    Why else would he be here?
    Fuck off, Gordie.
    Bitch. He went outside and rolled himself another cigarette.
    Tarah flicked something off her wrist. Her nails were painted dark blue.
    I came by here last night, said Damian. There was a girl – a woman – working in here.
    Girlwoman, Tarah mimicked. She ran her hand through the ends of her magenta hair and laughed. She softened, her fingers doing a little staccato dance on the glass counter. Are you some kind of asshole?
    No.
    Serial killer?
    No.
    How do I know that? She glanced through the window at Gordie. There’s a real
fuck
for you, she said. Gordie.
    She turned back to Damian. Her name’s Jasmine – we live in the same house. She’s at the Lundy’s Lane Museum. Ferry Street. That’s where she works, and don’t fucking tell her I said so.
    Thanks. Thanks a lot.
    There was a wreath of hair in an ornately framed shadow box over the desk where Jasmine worked in the Lundy’s Lane Historical Museum.
    VICTORIAN HAIR WREATH
    circa 1860-1865
    Hamilton, Ontario
    Human hair and horsehair, wire, wool, glass,
    steel, and wood beads
    Gift of the MacLeod Family
    Jasmine had never coveted anything the way she coveted that wreath of hair. It reminded her of her grandmother’s hair – long, silky, and white – which she hadbrushed and brushed as a child. Once, she had fallen asleep in her grandmother’s lap, her fingers still entwined in the white hair, and her grandmother hadn’t woken her.
    The wreath was shaped like a crescent moon, with hair of different shades – blond, honey-brown, dark brown, red, black, grey, and white – which had been stitched into loops that formed flowers, sprigs, and leaves. The wreath was made into a crescent, with its ends pointing up, so it could hold the luck inside. Whoever had made it had done it by gimping, which involved looping the hair over a knitting needle, binding it along a wire rod, and making another loop – a technique that Jasmine was trying to learn from a library book on hair decoration.
    When Tarah had dyed her hair dark blue, she’d let Jasmine cut some of it off. Jasmine had grouped the blue hair together in strands of twenty before making loops, and she was starting to get the hang of it. She hid the hair and knitting needle in a plastic bag in a drawer of the front desk of the museum. Maybe she could ask Tarah’s boyfriend, Matt, for some of his hair, since it was sandy brown, a nice contrast with Tarah’s. If it worked, she was going to give them the wreath, crescent-shaped, and open at the top, so they could hold their luck.
    You can’t keep people’s hair, her mother had told her.
    It was the first day that Sandra-not-yet-Jasmine had been hired to clean up the Hair Lair. She was swishing the soft broom across the floor, catching swirls of red, strawlike heaps of blond, wisps of grey.
    Why not?
    It’s not hygienic, for one thing, said her mother. It’s not right. It’d be like taking people’s toes or fingers.
    Look at it. It’s wonderful. All those colours –
    It’s
hair
, for heaven’s sake, Sandra. Put it in the garbage out back.
    She put some of it in the garbage and saved the rest of it. She shampooed it, carefully, and