The Cutting Edge

003

Imagine a white poodle.

Imagine the same white poodle, except with it growing out of somebody's head.

If nightmares could come to life then Hyejin reckoned she was living one right now. As someone who was just looking at it, she was already absolutely horrified; she couldn't even begin to imagine how the poor fellow with the poodle on his head must have been feeling. If she was in his shoes, she might have just leapt off a building.

"Ok..." she muttered, still a little shell-shocked.

"Please, just do whatever you need to, I can't live another second like this," the man begged. A look of anguish flashed across his eyes as he stared at his own reflection in the mirror. The poodle on his head seemed to be mocking him, white curls bouncing up and down with every slightest movement he made.

Hyejin took a couple of steps forward and picked up the scissors that she had thrown at him. "Fine, but you do realise that this is a neighbourhood barber shop and there's only so much I can do with what I have. Would you be alright if I—"

"Just do it!" the guy screeched.

"Ok ok! I'll do it!" Hyejin yelled back. If she didn't do something right this instant, she thought he might just yank out all his hair with his bare hands.

Taking a deep breath, she gave one last assessment of the train wreck she was faced with and decided that there was no other way about it. She put down her scissors and picked up the razor instead.

The man closed his eyes, not willing to take another look at the poodle. No matter what she did to his hair now, it couldn't possibly get worse. He didn't even know how he managed to be convinced to walk the red carpet with that mop of cotton candy on his head. His hairstylist had said that this was the latest trend in France and it would put him on the front cover of every magazine and newspaper. Within minutes after he made his appearance, his photos hit every social media platform, except it was for all the wrong reasons. He could still see the captions and headlines in his mind right now, each one more critical and damning than the one before.

"This might seem a little rude, so you don't have to answer me if you don't want to, but what on earth possessed you to do this to your hair?" Hyejin asked. It was the first time, and hopefully last time, she had witnessed such an unfortunate sight.

"I didn't do this to my hair. Some moron did," he sighed. "I don't want to talk about it."

"People nowadays like to do all sorts of strange things to their hair. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I once saw a guy on the street who had bright blue hair and he looked absolutely fantastic, somewhat like a comic book superhero, but then there was this huge biker with his Harley Davidson who had the exact same shade of blue and his just made him look like... a mouse that got dunked in blue dye. It was unfortunate."

"I did blue once, wasn't so bad."

"I see," Hyejin replied, her hands still moving swiftly across his head. Bits of white fluff slowly drifted down towards the floor, creating somewhat of a snowy effect. "So what brings you to a place like this? You seem like the sort who likes to do fancy things to your hair. A barber shop hardly seems like the right sort of place for you."

"You don't recognise me?"

Was she supposed to? Hyejin stopped what she was doing for a second, peering curiously at the man's reflection in the mirror. He did look awfully familiar, but she couldn't quite place where she had seen him before. Her father always said she had a memory like a sieve—this person had likely been sieved out.

Seeing the look of confusion on her face, he decided to put her out of her misery. "My grandmother used to bring me to this barber shop for my haircuts when I was a kid. Back then it was a friendly pot-bellied man who always cut my hair for me. His daughter always sat behind the counter doodling, though she always refused to show me what she was drawing, isn't that right, Hyejin?"