Her Hair Picked Up Another Universe

More about Her Hair Picked Up Another Universe

She was brushing her hair when space began making that noise again.

A dry crackling, followed by a man announcing the weather on a planet that had disappeared.

Rain through Thursday.

She looked at the gold hairbrush. Several stars were caught between its bristles. She removed them carefully and put them on the windowsill, where they blinked beside a dead moth.

Behind her, marble people stood among the ruins. One had spent three hundred years leaning forward to hear something.

Tonight he heard it.

A teaspoon striking the edge of a cup.

The sound came through her hair with such clarity that he almost remembered having hands.

Silver objects passed overhead. They resembled needles from a sewing basket belonging to someone much larger than God. Wherever they passed, the darkness puckered.

She brushed again.

The moon appeared twice.

Then once.

Then it was replaced by a pale round mark where the moon had been erased.

“I wish you would hold still,” she said.

She might have meant her hair.

White cloth stirred between the broken buildings. Beneath it, the water carried narrow bands of colour, like a television left running in a drowned apartment.

There was music in the interference now.

Three notes from a piano. A cough. The beginning of applause.

She recognized the cough.

Her father used to cough that way before telling her something unimportant: the shops would close early, there was a peach in the kitchen, somebody had borrowed his ladder.

She held the brush against her ear.

The marble people waited.

Across a billion miles of damaged evening, her father cleared his throat.

“There’s a—”

Static swallowed the rest.

She sat very still, holding a peach that had not yet arrived.

The signal faded. The silver needles went somewhere else. Slowly, the moon returned to its usual address.

She cleaned the brush.

There were no more stars in it, only a few dark hairs and one small sound.

She put the sound in a drawer.

Sometimes, years later, she opened it.

Nothing much happened.

Somebody was about to tell her something.