It’s only hair, she whispers, sweet and sultry as a summer breeze. It grows back. So live a little.
She is in every pair of scissors, every comb, every bottle of bleach or tube of dye. Her hands, clad in sanitary latex, move through every stylist in the world at least once.
Her gifts are sometimes subtle. An inch off the ponytail of a scared sorority girl; new bangs for a child who has never worn them before.
Her gifts are sometimes wild, tangled, and untamed. Electric colors. Perms and buzzcuts and sculptural formations fit to scrape the sky. Like any artist, she matches her art to the audience.
It’s only hair, she whispers. Express yourself.
She is with the young musician shellacking Elmer’s glue into his mohawk, encouraging it to reach higher and higher, hair set to reach up and touch the stars.
She is with the old woman who takes a bottle of temporary dye into the shower at her granddaughter’s urging, stepping out with wet curls as pink as a Sunday sunrise, with the blushing cheeks to match.
She is with the teen who cries slow, sad tears as the last of their chemotherapy-stricken hair drops away under the stylist’s clippers, as they open the box containing the rainbow wig they requested from their parents. It fits like a dream. It brushes their cheeks like a kiss.
She doesn’t care how conservative your experiment seems to anyone else.
It’s your skin. It’s your hair. And she thinks, always, that it looks amazing.
[image description: A black woman is shown in profile, looking at herself in a hand mirror with surprise and delight. Her hairdo resembles Elsa Lanchester’s in James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. She wears a lightning-bolt earring, and a white shirt against a deep green background. Text reads, “26 Tesla Jefferson – Small God of Experimental Hairdos.”]
Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.
Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:
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Homepage: http://www.smallgodseries.com/
