Hello. I am mountain, and you are tiny climber. Your smallness is almost incomprehensible to me. I said almost because how could you be beyond my understanding? You are small and brief and you have to move all the time. Why do you move so much? You know it is a sign of weakness, a sign that you don’t take up much space, like mountain.
A: Our profession does not lend itself to the conversational arts.
B: At least of the vocal or linguistic variety.
A: Our methods of communication tend to be… non-verbal.
B: Direct. Sometimes brutally so.
Whatever its motive, human hair modification provides unique insight into both individuals and the cultures which they inhabit. In an effort to both document and analyze the signs and signifiers of a universal human endeavor, we provide this selection of observed hairstyles, with accepted nomenclature.
Why are you here?
I hear you chuckle, and am fractionally gratified by it. You have heard me start off this address by hacking up a tired old philosophical joke, kicking off this inspirational oration with a twist of a Great Question (capitalized).
Martin Powell barges into the mayor’s office, Mavis close behind. The mayor, on the couch and flanked by cheerleaders, allows his head to loll forward and acknowledge Powell’s entrance and Mavis’ distress, greeting both with a dopey yet charismatic smile. The mayor’s face is scratched and abraded, but retains a significant portion of the handsomeness it possessed when he entered office.
How do milkmen define ‘good’?
The way it should be defined.
Can you be more specific?
In a word: no. You should ask a different question now. Maybe something about our uniforms.
“The Management provides the bag.”
I’m going to yell something, Rob thought, so he did. “Big hair in the morning!” He spread his arms out wide and grinned a wide grin as he yelled it. And Carter turned away from the television, a soccer match, the players so tiny, so crisp, so ineffectual on that big green field full of moiré patterns. The artful mowing of the field. Carter squinted, Carter squinted a lot. “What?” Carter said. She propped up her head on her right hand, fingers tangled in the hair around her ear, smothered by it. In her left hand she held what looked like a violin bow. He made a mental note to ask her about it. “My hair?” Carter said, and didn’t look happy.
A panorama of browns and beige! Sepia, as far as the eye can see! Everything awash in aged colors, positively drenched in them! Everything looked like it fell from a tree a month ago! We’d seen colors in those fancy Chinese rugs and we didn’t want them! They rattled the blood and unbalanced your electric field! Ask Tesla! Go ahead, you ask him! I know he’s dead!
You don’t know what irony is. Huh.
That makes sense. You’re five. And your brother’s three, so we won’t even ask him. Is he asleep? That’s fine. Is his hood up? Good. Remind me to explain irony later. Maybe when you’re seven. I think that’s when I learned about it. Yeah. Seven sounds about right.
There is a kind of smile only contented elderly men can master, untightened by self-consciousness or significant regret, grown from a life lived as well as circumstances would allow. Pleasant, drowsy, almost beatific, the smile slid onto Mr. Tompkins’ face right after the birth of his first grandchild and had never left, even while sleeping, except for the occasional stubbed toe. The smile didn’t waver as Mr. Tompkins said to the man in black, “You’re the devil, aren’t you?”
The man in black sighed as he folded up the newspaper and slapped it on the table. “Spoilsport,” he said.
From under the bed: “I just don’t think it’s fair, is all.”
“I’m not having this conversation again,” I said. I was on top of the bed, where I should be.
It is 1942. The shadow of the Axis darkens all of Europe, and the Allies face their darkest hour. There’s quite a bit of darkness everywhere, metaphorical darkness of course, a symbolic image of uncertainty, fear and oppression, not literal darkness, which still only occurs at night, in acceptable proportions to the daytime. Still, things are bad, and at night they’re even worse, thanks to the compounding of metaphorical darkness with actual darkness, which can be very scary and confusing. But a ray of hope shines out in this darkness, both figuratively and sometimes literally, an ordinary man turned extraordinary by science, an average Joe turned Allied secret weapon, a champion of freedom and goodness pledged to right wrongs and wring necks! His name? Be patient, you’ll find out soon.
Marston had planned quite well, or so he thought. The new leg would be just as good as the old, only he could put things in it. Important things, secret things. Documents, perhaps. Or gold bullion. Or a pistol. He asked the design team if they could line the hidden chamber with something impervious to prying x-rays. “Yes, we can,” they said, and altered the schematic.