Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe

once,’ God said to Himself, who was now no longer everything; specifically, He was not this hair, for had He been the hair He could not also have been jealous of the hair, or so He reasoned omnisciently. At first He considered wiping out all of humanity with an enormous flood, but then He thought better of it: ‘A lot of people think highly of this child’s hair. Is that any reason to kill them all? No.’ Instead, God, seemingly at random, fixed on the heartof the woman named after the first month of autumn, and He filled this woman’s heart with a love for the child that was frighteningly immoderate and frowned upon by most of the rest of the human community. And in this way the woman knew some small part of God’s own sorrow and helplessness. The end. Time for your haircut.”
    The water gushing from the shower head was very hot. Skip Hartman took me gently by the temples and brought my head under the water. Steam billowed up from the shower floor. I felt mournful and soothed. I wished that she would go on making up stories about my hair until one of us died—her, probably.
    Soon I was sitting in a swivel chair in the center of the book room wearing my white terry-cloth bathrobe. The book room seemed to have a knack for precipitating great onrushes of feeling. Skip stood in the doorway wearing her larger version of the same bathrobe. I swiveled left, I swiveled right, I swiveled left. Skip held a comb and scissors in one hand and a dark blue folded sheet in the other. She entered the room and did a few understated hip wiggles of the haircutters’ dance. She placed the scissors and comb on the edge of a shelf. While holding one edge of the sheet in her two hands, she cast the sheet up and out across the room. The dark sheet billowed in the sunlit room with the white walls and the books. She wrapped the sheet around my neck like a cape, whereupon I could not resist saying, like the owner of a couple of capes we knew, “I want some of these old books to spread around the house. I’ll sprinkle some in the backyard. I’ll tile the bathroom with books. Have you got any history books for the kitchen?”
    “I love to meet a fellow booklover,” Skip said, a look of mischiefon that face of looks. She walked toward me snipping the air with her scissors, closer and closer to my head,
snip, snip, snip
. “And what sort of haircut would we like today?”
    “Well, we would like something like what we have now.”
    “Do we mean a big mess?”
    “I guess we mean a big neatness.”
    “A trim?”
    “Yes.”
    “Or how about this?” Skip said. She plunged the scissors into the nest of my hair and cut off a big hunk right up close to my scalp. A big wad of black hair the size of a cat fell to the floor. Before I could stop her she did this twice more. My hand rushed up to the side of my head, where there was now an extensive patch of hair as short as the grass on the first green of a golf course. I screamed and stood up and clawed at my neck to remove the cape. “Why did you do that?” I yelled.
    “I don’t know.”
    “You just ruined my life!”
    Her face—that face of hers—grew red. Her eyes were wide open and big teardrops appeared at the bottoms of them and fell down her face. “But my darling,” she said, “you have also ruined my life. I thought that was understood.”
    I began by hitting her face and then I moved down and started beating her sides with both fists. I pounded away at her sides, using all my strength, until I felt a terrible burning sensation in my right cheek just below my right eye. I fell back onto the floor, holding my face. It felt as if a large, burning coal were embedded in my skin. “Make it stop,” I pleaded with Skip. I looked out at the room with my left eye and saw that she was gone. She came back with a paper towel and took my hands away from my face and placed the cool, wet paper towelon my right cheek. I saw the paper towel fill up with blood in seconds, and I understood that