Per Contra Fiction Fall 2007: Jennifer Byrne

From "Semi-Permanent Red"

"The worst part was, she'd been a real redhead once, without the aid of rubber gloves or sassy male stylists or rust-colored dye that stained her cheap tee-shirts to look like forensic evidence. As a kid and teenager, she'd had hair the exact color of cigarette embers right before they crumbled into ash, right before her father's index finger tapped them into a glass of dirty water, creating a hiss as they hit the shock of an opposing element. She'd loved that hiss -- trashy, really, but comforting somehow. It was the sound of resistance, of refusal to be extinguished.

Her color wasn't quite right anymore. She had handled swatch after swatch of unnervingly straight hair samples, perfect like the horsehair of paintbrushes, but the color never, ever, looked the same. Not on her own coarse, thick hair, neither straight nor curly, and never, ever sleek and shiny. On her hair, the color was either a sickly burgundy like a glass of merlot regurgitated after a hard night, or a laughable strawberry-blonde, the frothy color of a pre-teen’s lip gloss. Both she experienced with sad resignation, trying them out in different lights in hopes that they might by some alchemy combine to recreate that old truth. But hair products are not sentimental, and the chemicals did only what their particular molecules and polymers bade them when confronted with the fact of her hair. It was nothing personal: that was the good and the bad news." - Click Here to Read Full Story

Per Contra Fiction Fall 2007.