A Shirt without flowers

Content warning: mention of drug use

Her hair grows back every night. She braids them carefully and patiently every single morning, then she cuts them and puts them under the carpet, besides the rest of her hair from the nights before. Then she goes out of the house with her short hair.

It is night. She has already come back home. She is afraid to turn off the light, so she goes to bed to sleep because her nightmare will come back. She does not clearly remember her nightmares, but she knows that she sees them every night.

This in itself is scary enough that her hair grows long when she is asleep, but she is sure that she has had a terrible nightmare every night all her life. This is a secret that she does not want to share with anyone.

She picks up the small plastic bag that her friend had given her to take to forget about her pains and nightmares. She squeezes it into her fist and feels the powdery grains of cocaine between her fingers. She wishes that she could take it to allay her fears. However, there was a fear within her that had sparked when she saw her brother's cold corpse, due to an overdose, with her own eyes. She did not want to relive this nightmare. She put the bag aside.

She plays a piece of relaxing music and tries to fall asleep; but as her eyes warmed, thoughts flooded in, as if poison arrows were firing into her brain. A door was opening for her from the future. Bunch of lights appeared, a man was coming, the man she knew, and loved.

She extends her hands to the man whose face is invisible in the light. The man wants to take the girl's hands and take her to the light, but it is as if someone pulls the girl from behind against the light and towards the darkness. The girl shouts and stretches out her hands with all her strength, the man's hands come forward and their fingers touch each other. The girl sees the man's eyes. He is familiar, but she is drawn into the darkness again.

She jumps, her heart rate has risen. She is sweating and breathing vigorously. She looks at her clothes. The flowers on her shirt torment her. She picks up scissors and cuts the flowers one by one from her shirt and tears them to pieces.

She may sleep more easily without them as she hates flowers. The girl closes her eyes. She jumps back to when she was eleven years old. She takes the edge of the bed. The force that pulls her back frees her hands from the bed. The girl touches her hair; it's growing and getting longer.

She looks at the torn flowers on the floor. She runs on the flowers, runs the forest path from school to home, and laughs, sings, picks flowers and waves her hands at the neighbours with a kind of happiness that little girls usually have. She waves to him too, to him who she knew, to him who was her father's friend, the one who came to their house from time to time. The man’s house was near her school. Every day after school ended, on her way home, she would see him standing on the balcony of his house, waving to her.

On that day, halfway towards home, she noticed that she had left her book behind at school. She needed it, so had to go back and grab her book from the school. She picked it up. It was much later than the school's closing time. School streets were empty with no other students within sight. It was a warm and sunny afternoon.

She ran and crawled into her usual path in the forest toward home. A pair of strong hands suddenly grabbed her waist and pulled her back. She shouted, clenched her fists, and threw them back, tried to get herself free but to no avail. What power can an eleven-year-old little girl have to free herself from the clutches of a strong man?

She had strayed from her usual path. The flowers trembled under his feet. She saw a terrible face. She saw the eyes that she knew, but it became strangers to her and his nose blades under those eyes quivered. His big hands covered the girl's mouth. She was scrambling, but she could not save herself. She was very scared and out of the breath, her tongue was tied and she was crying.

Her hair is growing even longer.

The man threw her to the ground. No one could hear her. She straightened herself up, kicked him, and ran away, but those powerful hands grabbed her long hair again, pulled it, and threw her back on the flowers.

He lifted the girl's shirt, and suddenly it felt like the flowers on her shirt burned her body like fireballs, and thousands of nails seemed to sink into her bones. She could not recognize if this was pain or fear, but she fainted and did not feel anything anymore.

The sun shone cautiously through the opening between the two curtains as if it knew how hard she had fallen asleep.

The girl opens her eyes. It was as if she had woken up in a new room and was looking around. She cannot remember her nightmare, but she knew that she had it. The clock started ringing. She turns it off. She has a headache. Her mouth was acrid, and she could feel a bitter taste in her mouth. It is as if she has felt pain all her life.

She sat on the edge of her bed. She touches her hair. They are long. She is used to this. She thinks to herself; 'what would I do if one day I wake up and see that my hair is no longer growing?' She fears her thoughts.

Then with patience, she braids her hair and ties an orange band at the end of them. She takes scissors and cuts the braided hair. She lifts the corner of the rug and tosses the cut-off braided pieces under the rug next to the rest of the pieces from the nights before. She puts the rug back, then gets dressed to go to work with her short hair.