The Quick Aaron Alford (bio) A family friend called Dottie gave me my first haircut in the living room of her old house. I cried hard but did not move a muscle, only my eyes. “You were so still,” they tell me. “It didn’t take her long at all.” There’s a photo of me in a chair with a sheet around me—my face puffy, Dottie laughing, my hair still little-boy blonde. My chubby arms were frozen. My legs, like rolls of baker’s dough, shot straight out over the seat. I had long eyelashes and droopy cheeks I eventually grew into. I was told they got so big from Dottie and her mother-in-law Jean sucking on them so hard at church. Dad used to work at the bank right out of college and had no place to get a haircut besides Cotton’s Barber Shop. He told Cotton what to cut and what to leave long, and Cotton listened. “But the first thing he did was give me the whitewalls,” Dad says. “Took the clippers right around my ears. The white skin on your head shows like a circle, see? Like old whitewall tires.” We drive, and I tug the hair by my ears and see myself in the rearview mirror, wondering what Cotton will do to me. “I haven’t been back since,” Dad says. We walk in together. Young men stand along the wall and old men sit. There are three hairstyles on a poster, combs and scissors soaking on the counter, two barber chairs in a twelve-by-twelve cinder-block room. Cotton uses clippers, loud and buzzy with a vacuum hose dumping your hair out back. Birds take it to their nests. “Come on in this house,” Cotton says. We sit in a silence broken only by talk of the basketball game. One boy sits on a milk crate and gives me the eye. He knows I’m from the next town over. We know each other’s jersey numbers and if the other can shoot threes or not. [End Page 98] Each cut takes twenty minutes and costs $5.50. I tell him I want it short. “Right down to the quick,” Cotton says and slaps the guard on the clippers. I come back every two weeks and feel real grown the first time he slops shaving cream on my face. My best friends, brothers called Thom and Matt, lived in Dottie’s old house after she moved away. Their mother ran a beauty shop in a portable building off the front porch. She quit that after a while, and we used the room to teach ourselves guitar after school while other guys practiced ball. We’d stay up all night trying to figure out a song. When we finally got it down, or when our fingers started hurting, we’d quit. We worked on growing sideburns. We finished high school and grew our hair to our shoulders with spotty beards. I buzz my head now with Wal-Mart clippers. I strip to my underwear in the shower and crouch with my head between my knees. I tear open a trash bag and spread it out underneath to catch the clippings. I buzz every which way until it’s all gone. I throw my hair out in the yard. I recently did it too short, nearly bald. “What happened to you?” some friends asked. I told them I did it to make Thom feel better; that he cut his own hair once and messed up a spot; that his mother was embarrassed and made him shave his head to fix it; that Matt and I shaved ours too for his sake. I told them Thom had called me last night, troubled and broke and feeling more alone than ever. I told them I did it short for him and sent a picture of myself in the mail. Then he’d remember that he had not one brother but two. [End Page 99] Aaron Alford Aaron Alford is an MA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Texas Tech University, where he also works as a research assistant in The...