Home Haircut
Flash Fiction
The bowls were ascribed to be multi-purpose, which Sarah took as gospel and verse. With five young boys, creativity and efficiency were key to keeping the ship sailing.
A hairdresser was out of the question, so once a month, she sat her boys down, placed the silver metal bowls on their heads, and went to work. Hands steady, she cut them each a perfectly-level bowl cut. Speed was everything, for the other four boys waiting their turn would bang the bowls on their heads with wooden spoons, belting out Seven Nation Army at the top of their lungs, until the entire affair was over.
As they grew older, she outsourced the work to her two eldest boys. And still, the drumming and the singing carried on. It rocked the busy house and would find her anywhere she was — in the backyard, the laundry, her bedroom, the kitchen. Whatever mood she as in, she found herself humming along, and remembering to stop and capture the moment in her mind. For she knew (and was constantly reminded from the tomato plants she could never quite keep alive) how ephemeral all of this was.
Later, when only her youngest son was still living at home, and the others had come back for Christmas with their partners, they found a photo in a heavy album of the five of them lined up on the dining chairs, bowls on their heads, locks of hair on the floor and wooden spoons grasped in each of their little hands.
They jokingly rounded on their mother for giving them bowl cuts all of those years — this shared embarrassment from childhood, even though it was only now in hindsight they realised how uncool the haircuts actually were.
Sarah smiled through all of their criticisms, and when they finally went silent, she just channelled The White Stripes and started to chant that infamous bass line.
