Too Short

When a haircut takes more than it should

Rosie had been preparing for this hair appointment for weeks. It was not an appointment, it was a necessity. Night after night she had compared pictures, analyzed strands, studied shades, as if her life depended on it and maybe it actually did.

Of course she went to her favorite hairdresser. Hair was not something one left to chance. A wrong cut could cost months. Perhaps even a piece of her sanity.

The salon smelled of chemicals and heat. The cape closed tightly around her neck, almost like an embrace that had grown too firm. Rosie smiled tensely at her reflection.

“Just a little bit,” she said. “Not too short.”

The scissors moved in. A first lock fell. Heavy and final. Then another.

Rosie’s pulse began to pound. That was too much. That was wrong. She wanted to speak, but her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. The sounds in the room became distorted. The snipping suddenly sounded like bones cracking.

Strands landed on the floor, one after another, like evidence of a crime. When she saw a particularly long tuft fall, something inside her tore. For a moment, everything blurred before her eyes. And then it cleared. Too clearly.

In the mirror, a stranger stared back at her. Too short. Too light. Disfigured. The person there looked naked, exposed, vulnerable. As if not only her hair had been taken, but her protection, her structure, her stability.

“That… was what we agreed on,” the hairdresser said cautiously.

Rosie heard only a distant rushing sound. A humming, like inside her head.

Too short. Too short! TOO SHORT!!!

Her hands trembled. Then they did not. Slowly, she lifted them. Her fingers clawed into the cape, tearing it from her neck. She rose so abruptly that the chair toppled backward. Someone was talking to her. Maybe the hairdresser. Maybe herself.

“What have you done?” Rosie’s voice sounded foreign, rough, fractured.

The hairdresser stepped back. “We can still fix it, please calm down.”

Fix it.

The words exploded in Rosie’s mind. She saw the scissors on the trolley. Metallic. Gleaming. Sharp. Before she understood what she was doing, they were in her hand.

Rosie lunged forward. A scream cut through the room. Her fingers tangled in the hairdresser’s hair. The scissors flashed. A wild slash. A second. A third. Chaos. A mirror shattered. Glass rained down like shimmering hail.

Someone tried to pull her back, but she was stronger than she had ever been. Something raged inside her. Something that had been waiting for this cut.

Then silence. The humming was gone. Rosie blinked. She stood in the middle of the salon. The floor was covered in hair and… blood? The hairdresser lay motionless between overturned chairs, her eyes wide open, as if still checking whether the cut was straight. The scissors were buried deep in her chest.

Slowly, the world returned. Sounds. Sirens in the distance. Footsteps. Voices.

Rosie stood up. She looked at her reflection one last time. Between the cracks, her face appeared fragmented. Broken. And yet strangely calm. And in her eyes there was something that had become even shorter than her hair. Her sanity. Too short, she thought. But at least neat.

She picked the cape up from the floor and carefully draped it over the lifeless body of the hairdresser, as if covering up a minor mishap. Then she smoothed her new haircut. Checked the line and the edges. It still needed a little refinement.

Rosie took her bag. Opened the salon door. The bell above the entrance rang bright and innocent. Outside, the wind swept down the street and through her too-short hair. She smiled.

Behind her, people began to scream.

At home she would fix it.

---

This story came to my mind during an exercise in a writing class I took last year. The prompt was the following picture of some hair and the story was immediately in my mind:

Image by Johanna Pakkala on Pixabay

Author’s note

I’m Sacha, a writer based in Switzerland, currently working on my first full-length novel. Fragments and the Dark is my home for the shorter pieces: stories, fragments, experiments, and a chance to connect with readers who share a taste for the darker corners of fiction.

I’d love for writing to one day become my full-time work. If you’d like to help me along that path, you can buy me a coffee or become a paid subscriber using the buttons below. And if that’s not for you right now, a like, comment, or restack genuinely makes a difference too.

Thank you for reading. 🖤