The kitchen scissors

Text 1: A Hundred Strokes, by Joanna Riis

An original short story extract.

Grace locked the bathroom door, laid her mother’s kitchen scissors on the edge of the sink, and looked at herself in the mirror for what she had decided would be the last time.

Her hair came down past her shoulder blades. It had always come down past her shoulder blades. Her grandmother brushed it on Sundays, a hundred strokes, counting aloud. Her aunts lifted it in their hands at weddings and said what a shame it would be ever to cut it, and her mother plaited it every school morning so tightly that by lunchtime her scalp ached. People talked about her hair as if it belonged to the family, like the good china or the piano nobody played.

She picked up the scissors. They were heavy and cold, the handles worn smooth by thirty years of cutting string and chicken and the tags off new clothes. She gathered a hank of hair at the side of her head and held it out, and it lay across her palm like a rope.

For a long time she did nothing. The tap dripped. Downstairs the television was laughing at something.

Then she cut.

The sound was louder than she expected, a thick, crunching bite, like someone stepping on gravel. The hair fell into the sink and lay there in a dark curl, and it looked suddenly like something that had died. Grace stared at it. Her heart was going hard. There was no way back now, and the thought made her feel sick, and then, a second later, made her feel something else entirely, something light and fizzing, like the moment at the top of a slide.

She cut again. And again. She stopped being careful. She hacked at the back, twisting her arm to reach, and long ropes of it slid down her shoulders and onto the floor and around her bare feet, and she let them fall.

When she had finished, her head felt strange, as though it might float off. The girl in the mirror had a ragged, uneven crop that stuck up at the crown, and a long white neck, and enormous eyes. She looked about twelve. She looked about thirty. She did not look like anybody’s granddaughter.

Someone tried the door handle.

“Grace?” Her mother’s voice. “What are you doing in there?”

Grace looked at the girl in the mirror, and the girl looked back, and neither of them answered.

Explore how Joanna Riis uses language and structure to present Grace’s feelings as she cuts her hair.

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