Scissor Blades: To Cut The Hair Of A Veela

“Are you ready for this, Fleur?” The silver of my mother’s hair shone in the looming sunlight of the kitchen window. “We haven’t the entire day to spend griping over this, you realize.” The very pupils of her eyes demanded much more of me than the threat of her scissors.

I gulped; then nodded.
 
Seated in the mahogany chair, my fingertips stroked the chars I'd engraved multiple times into the arms; dates of which distancing themselves between my young age of three and the Christmas break prior. The space beneath my fingernails tingled at the memory’s sensation of soft wood between them as Mother's manicured hands lopped water onto my hair's thin layers. Water from the well soaking through them was unbearable: anything from the outside was freezing in winter.
 
I shivered.
 
“Now, Fleur,” her skin was too silky to be soft against my uneven tips, “you know we have to do this.”
 
Unthinkingly, she dropped the strip of hair to my shoulders: I ached to itch the spot where my drenched mane and cotton robes met.
 
“Now, what did I tell you?”
 
“Peripheral before pain,” I nodded, “beauty before death.”
 
They were words I’d spent my entire life muttering, repeating, proclaiming at my mother’s satisfaction, but I never had believed them: I never would.
 
Only a lunatic would believe them.


Only a woman who dared cut the hair of a veela.
 
Only my mother.
 
Preparing for the first of many scissor snips, my hands coiled around the chair’s arms and gripped: tightly, as always.
 
At a young age I’d been forced into this very same chair; tied down with yards of rope around my wrists and ankles, disabling my ability to run. Now, however, I used the pedantic restraint taught to me by countless cotillions to keep the trepidation crammed within my rib cage for as long as humanly possible: for as long as veely possible. I didn’t even allow myself the luxury of biting my nails in the restive fear of Mother doing-
 
My vocals shook: I shrieked.

For fear of my mother doing what she’d just done: chop off more than I’d anticipated.
 
Tears were welling in my eyes, sliding off my eyelashes, rolling down my cheeks; dripping from the edge of my jaw to the plastic sheet Mother had spread across the tile for easy maintenance.
 
“Oh, you just hush, young lady,” Mother scolded, “you’re being overdramatic.”
 
I was inclined to sniff at the reprimand: hack at her hair and see how she dealt with it: see how she dealt with the pain no quantity of magic could heal. Instead, though, I merely bit my lip. Being half-veela, her hair had never frayed at the tips, had never gotten into tangles; had never grown past her elbows. She had never experienced the feelings: the cold metal of newly purchased scissors: the moist sting of aging ones against warmth of her hair. She hadn’t gone through the sensation of sharpening terror both inside and out of her: she had never had that knowing flow through her veins that before the next moment passed…
 
The pain was unbearable. It was like cutting off fingers, or toes; like pulling out teeth and slitting your tongue all at once.
 
Cross my heart and hope to die; stick a needle in my eye.
 
It felt almost as bad as that. I’d know, too- I’ve tried it, once, when I was younger. Mother had been using the same scissors on me as she had on our poodle, creating a viral hazard in itself. Worst of it was, though, that she hadn’t even been cutting: she’d just been twiddling the scissors against my streaks, severing them in such minuscule proportions that only I could have noticed: that only I could have felt. She wouldn’t even acknowledge my anguish as she went right on sending sears of pain through my extensions.
 
It was then that I noticed her knitting needles nearby. Good thing, too: a shiny needle through each of my temples hadn’t hurt as badly as corroded scissors through my hair’s strings.
 
The hair of the veela is both its greatest of strengths and greatest of weaknesses. Like Samson, in the bible: only he didn’t have to feel the snip of Delilah’s scissor blades.
 
I bit my tongue- harder… harder… the scissors kept moving along, taking their time… my teeth, also moving through the layers, were not as dainty, threatening through my it… snip… sni-
 
The scissors stopped: the doorbell rang. Thank Merlin.
 
Witches and wizards - witches, especially, never cease to comment on how absurd it is, the way we treat our hair. The great lengths we resort to in order to keep it clean: the way we use only the softest of brushes and keep it such a great distance from the kitchen stove.
 
Ha- they have no idea, nor will they ever. We would never tell them, just as the merpeople would never let on that they have to sand their fins once a year: they’re the secrets of the tribes, the price of our allure.
 
I gazed down upon the plastic sheet: few clips of hair now floated in the thick green liquid, dissolving into it gradually. Veela blood, it was everywhere: glowing against the plastic, seeping through the embossed edges of the company emblem: its sour taste seethed through my tongue’s teeth marks.
 
Peripheral before pain, death before beauty: it’s a small wonder, how many tombstones these are written on.