From Burning Butch by RB Mertz, 2022
The next night, I got my hair cut short. I closed my eyes and thought of Samson, and how hair was dead skin growing out of you, like memories, and how, in my case, it might give me more strength to shed myself of the past, the dead cells, the broken chargers, the burned bridges. I watched it all fall to the floor around me.
When she was finished, I looked like a boy and a girl. I smiled hello to myself.
“You look good,” the stylist said, playing with the wave of reddish-blonde hair she’d left sticking up in the front. “It looks like a little flame.”
I thought of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down to the first twelve apostles, after Jesus was dead. There were tongues of fire on their foreheads, to show that God was talking through them now, too, not just Jesus. How now, everyone could be a Christ, like every human body was the ears and eyes and lips of God. That was the whole point of it.
She asked if I wanted my neck done like a boy or a girl.
“Boy,” I said.
I walked out of the salon into gray spring. I pulled my green blazer a little tighter, lifted the collar to cover the newly shaved back of my neck. Walking into the Panera for coffee, I caught a glimpse of myself in the window and thought I was someone else. Would Jesus still recognize me? Would he ever come out to defend me, or the idea of me?
