Old Woman cut the girls’ hair every month and gathered up the dead fluff to make pillows. There was plenty of fabric left, rolls of stars, stripes, polka dots.
“We’ll run out before the fabric does,” she told herself while sewing. The girls were still too young to know they were going to die. What was old enough? Maybe thirteen.
They lived in a Walmart, where they rationed their store of goods without fighting amongst themselves. Stragglers dropped by, several a week, looking for provisions, and they shared what they still had. There was plenty left. Plenty of pillows, too, but the girls needed something self-made to sell to stragglers, and the pillows were souvenirs of the farthest outpost in Kansas, run by girls and Old Woman. It was hard for passers-by to find something to trade with the girls, something the girls didn’t already have. Luxury goods would work, the kinds of toys and candies not sold at Walmart.
One straggler was desperate to feel safe. She snuck in at night to take a gun, while most of the girls were sleeping. Old Woman kept the key to the guns. Anyone could see that Old Woman was in charge, that she would absorb the danger of living with resources. The straggler saw Old Woman sleeping in a model bed beside the fish tanks. One luxury Old Woman allowed herself was to keep her bed near those living fish, watching them dart and burble when she opened her eyes, whenever she couldn’t sleep under the glare of the fluorescent lights.
(“Where does the lights come from? the girls asked her. “Does it come from God?” The Old Woman said, “Yes, it comes from God.”)
The girls mostly slept in backrooms, the old staff kitchen and offices where you could turn the lights off. Some slept in the dressing rooms.
When the straggler approached Old Woman, she asked for a gun. Asked first. Asked.
“No,” said Old Woman.
“I could be killed out there alone,” said the straggler. “I need protection.”
Old Woman drew her purple comforter up to her chin and shook her head. The straggler crept closer to Old Woman, who didn’t call out for the girls. The straggler had a knife. Two knives. Knives were everywhere. Once Old Woman was out of the picture (in the straggler’s mind), the straggler stole the key and two guns.
When the girls woke up, their leader was dead. Their mother and grandmother. Their living source. Before they buried her behind the store, they cut her hair.
Each girl took a silver lock to braid into her own hair, so that forever after, people would be confused about their age. How could twelve-year-olds go gray? Soon, the girls forgot how old they were. They stopped trading with people who passed by.
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Ivy Grimes lives in Georgia, and her work has been published in The Baffler, hex, ergot., Maudlin House, BODY, Cold Signal, Cover, and elsewhere. For more, please visit http://www.ivyivyivyivy.com.
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 