Tidbits--freewrite

---There is a profession that specializes in the shapes of skulls: hairdressing in Taiwan. All skilled in head massages and hair washing, the hairdressers on this little island could probably tell you about a multitude of skulls using their collective experience. They could tell you how the hair falls, or doesn't, from the white scalps they have seen. They have seen the place where the hair meets the skin, those little goosebumps that rise when hair is wet.

And they know something of what goes on under that skin, too. They know how to get a seated head talking to alleviate the boredom of immobility in the barber's chair. They know that the stories are waiting to come, at the tip of the tongue. Or maybe speaking with clients is their way of tapping life outside the glass doors, beyond the smell of perming chemicals and hair product.

Everyone leaves some hair on the floor. Who sweeps it up? What spells can you cast from the fallen curls, a memory describing the shape of a scull, an offered exchange of stories?

---Fingers already stained in muddy clashes of chalk dust, the seamstress marks the leg of my pants. "That'll do?" she asks. When I give the pants to her in a paper bag, there are remnants of the warmth from my body in the cloth. What is it that I have left with her? What is it that she feels when she picks up the cloth that has left my body, and lies compliant in her hands? Probably she thinks nothing. She sees too much of this. She lives on worn objects. The threads beneath her chalky fingers are always alive, but she has no time to think about those pulses, helter-skelter, that remain in that skin, that cloth, when shed.