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In the shit-end of summer, hell’s so close you’d think it was right under the asphalt. You can see glimmers of it just outta reach on every road, spilled across and shimmering so your mouth waters, even though you know when you get close it won’t be there to drink.
His mama’s like that.
She always seems real until you get too close. She slips in and out of reach and leaves him wanting, and her skirts billow against his boy legs. She smokes a cigarette with one hand and with the other teaches him how to tell her I love you. It’s always the blue dress, too long for him, the sleeves slipping off of his five-year-old shoulders as she dabs lipstick onto his mouth with a fingertip. She spent days speaking into his long hair, baby straw blonde. You’re beautiful, she would braid, you’re beautiful. You got your mama’s hair. With a cigarette hanging from her still lips, she tells him he’s perfect. He can feel her hands in his hair, but when he reaches up to touch her; to crawl in her lap; to fall asleep with his head pillowed on her breast and her carcinogens in his lungs, she’s gone.
He walked with Judy down the road in a hundred degrees, pointed to the heat haze on the horizon and taught her how mirages worked. At night, Judy would sit on his lap; he’d brush through the matted curls going dark with age and he’d tell her I love your hair. You got your daddy’s hair.
Daryl feels the scissors slide open against the bottom inch of his hair, between his shoulder blades and streaking dark, and doesn’t hear himself say “wait.”
(he didn’t know if his daddy heard him say wait or not; he didn’t know how he couldn’t hear him because it’s one of the things he remembers most, the raw way his voice is scraping out of his throat wait wait no I don’t but his daddy has a fistful of his mama’s hair, is pulling hard enough it makes Daryl’s scalp ache, and when he cuts it Daryl drops to the ground like a marionette)
Daryl opens his mouth to breathe. He’d been drinking sand instead of water.
“We agreed,” Rick is saying, and his voice is low, soft like his lips to the top of his head. The scissors are glinting on the windowsill now, Daryl realizes belatedly, reflecting moonlight at him. Rick’s voice slides down to his ear. His mouth is steady, the scratch of his beard soothing on his cheek. “Remember why?”
He shuts his eyes. Rick’s breath is warm, and his mouth drops to the edge of Daryl’s jaw and presses. Daryl reaches to weave a hand through the hair at the nape of his neck, hold him in place there.
“It’s safer for you.”
“I remember,” Daryl mumbles; he keeps his eyes shut and his fingers buried, his lover pressed alongside him. “I know.”
He remembers- even though it keeps glimmering horizon-line between his daddy’s fist and Merle’s and the muscle of the crew they ran into on the supply run a half-week back. It’s one of those, and he’s either seven or sixteen or forty-eight. It’s been a year since they saw another soul and when they catch him by the hair, pull so hard his neck cracks back and his body slams to the ground, he remembers with relish why he had been grateful for the lull. The musclehead drops a clump of hair from his fist and uses what Daryl still has as a leash, winds it around his knuckles twice and pulls him up to his knees.
It’s when he’s washing the blood out of his clothes the next day that Rick says I think we should cut your hair and Daryl feels the pull stinging his scalp, the bald spot, the knife cutting into his throat and says yeah.
“Yeah,” again. His hand slips out of Rick’s hair, falls mute back down to his knees. “I remember.”
The scissors lift off the windowsill in Rick’s grip. He feels them settle again, and his fingers whisper against his jeans while Rick speaks into his hair in apology, his lips moving against his head.
“It’ll be a good change. Somethin’ different.”
There’s a moment’s pause, and the quiet ssnnip, the faintest tug of the metal on him and an inch of hair falls to their kitchen floor.
Rick is asking him if he’s okay, blurry, in and out of focus and Daryl signs yes so Rick keeps going.
“It’ll look good. We won’t go too short, about Judith’s length. She’ll be excited to match.” With fondness, Rick slips his fingers through the mess of it. He brushes one of the gray streaks to its ends and cuts off a few inches more. “By the time it grows out again, maybe you’ll be all gray.”
Mama burnt up still blonde. He’d never thought about it- her, gray. His experience is limited to the mirage: her face perpetually twenty-nine, her teeth yellow from nicotine, her dress blue and nails unpainted telling him you’re beautiful. Mama Grandma with Judy on her lap, a cigarette hanging from her lips. Untangling curls to tell her stories, her hair long and perfect and gray.
He feels the night air against the back of his neck. The scissors on the windowsill reflect the full moon back at him.
Rick’s fingers brush the snippings off his shoulders to the floor, brush his jaw turn up to kiss him on the lips. When Daryl breathes after, it’s audible, and Rick is talking to him in his mother’s language.
You’ll still be hers. You’ll still be you.
I know, Daryl says, and he’s slipping his hands up to pull Rick down to him “you help me remember.”