When she was a child and furious, a strand would smoke. When she was heartbroken, the copper would fade to a dull, rusted brown. When she was truly, devastatingly happy—a state she had only experienced twice—the tips would glow like the last second of a match.
Leo was a botanist. He smelled like soil and rain. On their first date, at a noisy ramen shop, he didn’t stare at her hair. He stared at her hands while she talked about her job as an archivist—how she loved the quiet order of old letters, the way a forgotten sentence could bloom back to life after a hundred years. carrie emberlyn
The air in the room shimmered. Every single strand of her hair lifted off her shoulders and blazed a pure, silent gold. It wasn't fire. It was light. The light of a star seen up close. It lasted maybe two seconds. Then she yanked away, gasping, slapping at her own head, waiting for the smoke alarms to shriek. When she was a child and furious, a strand would smoke
She fell in love with him in the stacks of a university library. He was showing her a book on lichen— yes, lichen —and he was so animated, so unapologetically excited about the symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an alga, that she felt a warmth spread from her chest. She looked down. A strand of her hair, the one above her left ear, had curled into a perfect, glowing question mark. She quickly tucked it behind her ear, her heart hammering. Leo was a botanist
He didn’t ask if it was natural. He didn’t call it fire hair. He just reached out, very slowly, and touched the tip of the strand that had formed the glowing question mark. It was cool to his fingers.
“Oh,” he said, softly. As if he had just solved a puzzle he’d been working on for a long time. “So that’s what that is.”