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Samson, by Matthew Müller

My mother came home one night while we were still living in Germany and sat next to my father at the table and touched his hair, lifting a section, thinking, lifting another black swoop, examining. He kept eating, trying to ignore her, smiling at us and raising his eyebrows to signify that he did not know what it meant and wasn’t trying to think about it. But we all knew something was coming, and we grinned, waiting for what it would be.

Finally my mother said, “I think it’s time we cut your hair.”

My father stared at her, then said he wouldn’t do it, not ever. “I’ll gladly do anything else Tina, but you can’t cut my hair.”

A few days later my mother brought a bed sheet and a small chair into the bathroom and with a little smile she sat him down on it and draped the sheet around his shoulders.

My brother and I watched from the bathroom door. My father smiled at us, his big devil smile: He wasn’t scared of anything. My mother took the first big serpent of hair into her hands and slowly pulled it away from his head. Before cutting she gave us her own contented smile: she was winning, our mother. The bathroom light in the ceiling shone down yellow. I put my fingers into my mouth and watched my mother flick the scissors from her pocket. She held my father’s hair between the scissor’s sharp shiny edges and then looked at him and waited for his nod. He smiled at her and then slowly she pushed the scissors down into the flesh of his hair. His whole body contorted. “Ouch! Tina!” he shouted. He jumped up from his seat. We all rushed to him, trying to help. He flung the sheet from his shoulders and froze in the bathroom. We stared at him in horror. He started laughing.

“It doesn’t hurt when you cut hair!” he said. “Hair feels nothing.” He kept laughing, winked at us, and then gave my mother a sly victorious look of his own.

She hit him with the bunched up sheet. “You can’t do this to your wife. Das war ganz gemein,” she said.

He smiled at her and sat down, though this time he became very quiet. My mother took his hair very gently between her fingers and started to cut, looking at him cautiously. But there was nothing more for him to do. It was all too late. His hair was falling now in big black curves to the floor. It fell lightly and beautifully, as if the curves might float back up at any moment but enchanted by my mother, continued falling down. It fell in soft dark expanding piles around my father’s chair on the dim bathroom floor, and my brother and I crept down into the darkness and lifted his thick hair up before our eyes. It was a part of our father but not a part, and the snakes separated into strands of black. We grabbed more, thick and strong, and started to throw them at each other until our mother kicked us out.

When my father came from the bathroom he looked disoriented, thin and stooped. It seemed as if he didn’t know where to go anymore, or what to do. He was suddenly a small tree with thin little branches. He looked around the apartment and then stopped, my mother still playing with his hair in the back, trying to see if she had cut it right. We stood in front of him quiet and then started to giggle. He looked down at us and sighed and tried to chuckle. Finally, he stared at the piano. He walked over and poked a couple of the keys. His fingers started to make little runs. He looked back at us and hit the piano keys a little harder, then harder and harder. He rolled up his sleeves, sat at the bench, and then he was gone, carried into a wild cyclone of music and noise and thrashing hands, still going when we went to bed, his piano playing pumping away in the dark outside of our room, filling our dreams until the morning came, bright and fresh and quiet.

In Oregon, some years later, the truth about the hair came out. My mother told us, over dinner one night, that our father had been in a rock band, that he had played guitar and keyboards, and that he was the lead singer.

We didn’t believe it.

“But it’s true,” she said. “It’s why he still always has to dress in black. And do you know what his name was? Eric Axe.” Then she giggled.

“Eric Axe?!” we asked in disbelief.

“Yes, he would even carry a medieval axe on stage with him, and there was his long flowing hair, this crazy man. Who did I marry?”

My father was embarrassed and smiled and looked down. “That’s not who I am anymore,” he said, but the shadow of it was growing all around him, and we could see it coming alive. We stared at him with a mixture of nervous disbelieving awe and started laughing and shaking.

“When he’d come on stage,” my mother said, enjoying herself, “it would be completely dark and the smoke machine would come on, and then your father would be screaming into the microphone from that darkness for as long as he could, and just when he was about to faint the lights would all flash on and the music would start in a huge crash.”

We laughed, rocking back and forth, our faces bright, hitting each other, looking over at him.

“What did you scream?” I asked.

“Just Ahhhh,” he said, opening his mouth. “Like I was at the dentist.” Then, he also laughed.

“So why did you cut your hair?” we asked. “What happened to it? Why don’t you have it anymore?”

“Tina cut it, don’t you remember. You were all there.”

The memory hesitantly came back. We were all silent, thinking of the long snakes of hair falling in the yellow bathroom light.

“I wish you still had it,” my brother said.

“Me too,” I said.

My father and mother just smiled at each other across the table, and kept eating.

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