Haircut by Margaret Lucke

     The first thing Hallie did when her fiancé died was to shear off her hair. His corpse was still warm in the bedroom as she stood before the bathroom mirror, washed the blood from the blades of the scissors, and watched it swirl down the drain. She lifted her long blond tresses away from her neck and began to cut. As the tangled strands landed in the trashcan she felt a heavy weight falling away. 
     She looked in the mirror and smiled. The person smiling back was someone she didn’t know, a naked woman with tears in her eyes and jaggedy points of hair sticking out all over her head. Hallie could hardly wait to get to know this beautiful stranger. 
     Now she could start fresh, begin her life all over again.
She turned on the shower and when the water was almost too hot to bear, she stepped in. She lathered herself with shampoo and soap that released the scent of flowers.
     After drying herself with a thick, fluffy towel, she used it to wipe down the shower and the sink. She stuffed the towel into the trashcan and, almost as an afterthought, she dropped in the scissors too.
     She stepped into the bedroom, averting her eyes from Martin’s body on the bed. Her clothes still lay heaped in the corner where they’d been when he died. She carried them into the bathroom and hastily put them on, glad to see that her jeans and shirt showed no traces of blood.
Hallie hadn’t intended to kill him. It was an act of self-defense. Martin always liked to play rough in bed, but this time he’d closed his hands around her throat more tightly than ever before. Struggling to breathe, she choked out, “Basta!”—Italian for enough, their safe word, the signal that he must stop. He ignored her. Squeezed harder.
   Her body bucked, her arms flailed. She banged her hand on the bedside table and felt something metal. Cool, hard.
     The scissors.
   Earlier in the afternoon they’d been shopping. Martin had bought a new cashmere coat. Back at the house, he’d taken the coat and Hallie into the bedroom. He snipped off the hangtags and hung the coat in the closet. Then, abandoning the scissors and tags on the table, he flung Hallie onto the bed. 
As his hands crushed her throat, she gasped for breath. Her lungs felt ready to explode. Pinpoints of bright light danced in the darkness in front of her eyes.
Her fingers closed around the scissors. She pulled them in close, next to her head. 
    “Basta!” She tried to scream it, but she couldn’t push the word past the band of fists sealing her throat.
     Frantic to make him release her, she jabbed at his hands with the scissors. Jabbed again. 
     Without letting go, he lowered his head to kiss her.
     It was luck, or perhaps fate, that guided the blades to the hollow at the base of his neck and thrust them deep into his flesh. Martin collapsed on top of her, bathing her face in his blood.
     For a long moment she lay there, too shocked to move. Then she rolled out from under him and curled into a ball, crying as she sucked in sweet, wonderful air. 
     Surely Martin hadn’t planned to kill her, any more than she intended for him to die. But what if he had meant it? What if he’d concocted a scheme to get rid of her and blame her death on innocent lovemaking that, in their passion, they let get out of hand? Or maybe he wouldn’t explain what happened but would simply wrap her body in the cashmere coat and toss her in the lake, as if she never even existed. 
    Lately they spent most of their time together quarreling. She’d been pressing him for decisions about their future. Maybe his hands wringing her throat had been his answer to her demands.
     The shifting slant of the afternoon light through the curtains told her time was running short. She made herself get up and go into the bathroom. That was when she took the scissors to her hair. Martin loved it long. He once said he’d kill her if she cut it. She always assumed he was making a joke, using a figure of speech. 
     Now she stared at herself in the mirror again, running her palm over her shorn head. It felt so odd. She wondered if anyone she knew would recognize her. If not, that was okay. She scarcely recognized herself.
     Better take the stuff in the trashcan with her, Hallie decided. She lifted out the plastic liner with all of its telltale contents and shoved it into the shopping bag that had held the cashmere coat. The bag would look less conspicuous if someone saw her leaving the house.
     Self-defense, yes. Even so, Hallie didn’t want to stay around to tell her story to the police.
   She paused by the bed long enough to pull a blanket over the body. “Goodbye, Martin,” she said. “I loved you, you know. I believed all the promises you made. I should have known that for you, love would never be enough.”
     Hallie had no idea where she would go, what she would do next. For so long, her life had revolved around Martin’s plans, Martin’s needs, Martin’s whims. She no longer had a real sense of what she, Hallie, wanted and needed. But she was eager to find out. To her surprise what she felt now was not grief but relief, not a sense of loss but an opening of possibilities.
     The bedroom door made a satisfying click as she shut it behind her.
     Martin’s wife was in for a surprise when she got home.

​About the author:

Margaret Lucke flings words around as an author, editor, and teacher of fiction writing classes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes tales of love, ghosts, and murder, sometimes all three in one book. She is a former president of the Northern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Visit her at https://margaretlucke.com/