The Girl With Golden Hair

Note: this completed short story first appeared in the magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Once, in the city called Mu, lived a girl with hair of real gold. When she was born, the city's people came to meet her, crowding into the bloodstone hut near the city's largest grove where her parents lived and farmed and fished in the river. They formed a line to touch the slick of her hair.

"She will do a great thing," her mother said. "A girl with golden hair must do a great thing."

The Queen Loreen sent a servant to see the girl they would name Oovis. When the servant returned to the palace, the Queen asked if the girl's hair was truly golden.

"Golden as the sun," the servant replied.

The Queen sent the servant to the land in the mountains to fetch there a root that guaranteed immortality—a task from which none of her servants had ever returned. Then the Queen went herself to see the girl with golden hair.

The girl's hair had come with her from the womb. It was shoulder-length and hard and heavy. The girl could not move her head under its weight. The Queen saw this and laughed.

"You will be a pointless girl," she said to the baby. "And your hair will not be so extraordinary. I will see to that." The Queen turned to the girl's parents. "I will be checking the tax records, to make sure you are paying daily for that bloodstone with which you built this hut."

"We pay," the father said. "We've always paid."

"We'll see," said the Queen. When she returned to the palace, she searched the records but found no mistakes. She walked through her courtyard and stared down into her mirror pond; her own hair was brown as tree bark, brown as mud. She issued a decree: there would be no more trees with brown bark, no more dirt. If the Queen spotted the color brown, she would send the offenders downriver, where the fish people lived, so that the fish people could eat their heads. This, she told her congregation, would improve relations with the fish people.

Oovis' parents, who survived on the food from their garden and the fruits from their fruit trees, chopped down the trees and covered the dirt with white leaf mulch from the banyo trees in the grove. They planted more banyo trees, even though these would grow unbearable in the late season, when the trees shed their leaves and chattered like nervous maidens in the cool evening air. They advised their daughter, who grew to be plain in her adolescence despite her golden hair, to stay out of trouble. They forbade her from attending the palace protests with her peers.

"But I'm supposed to do a great thing!" Oovis would yell. "How can I do it if you keep me from standing up for what I believe in?"

Her parents knew better. They too had believed in things. Then they grew to know the city in which they lived.

"When you're of age," they said, "you can do whatever you want."

But Oovis was a girl with golden hair, and she fit the city better than the Queen, whose brown hair shone like murky lake water in the sun. She watched her parents prick their fingers each morning and drip their blood into a bowl and place it outside their door for their tax. A daily offering that was collected by the Queen's servants. Oovis hated that her parents suffered, that their fingers never healed. Oovis wouldn't give the tax herself—she was frightened of blood—but she snuck out her bedroom window the night of the protest with a pocketful of stones to throw at the palace windows. The banyo trees, in their naked season, whispered as Oovis climbed the wooden fence into the empty lot across the way.

"Where are you going, golden girl?" one asked.

"She's not allowed to go to the palace," another said.