Pearl

Chapter Fourteen: Ice Cream

The little girl giggled.

"It's so soft!" she said with surprise, running her small chubby hand through the forest of short pink hair on the guest's head.

The guest kept still, feeling the girl's hand through those flexible extensions of herself that coated her scalp. The warmth, the residual baby fat, the pulse—it teased her appetite.

"But why is it pink?" Charlotte pouted. "I want pink hair too!" Then, shouted down the hall in the imperious way of children—"Daddy! I want pink hair too!"

"Is hair not pink?" the guest asked, but then answered her own question with her silent repertoire of images, blurred and scattered memories of people governed by customs of men and laws of nature that no longer seemed quite so definite to her, but certainly still seemed to order the world around her.

"It is if you're a princess or a pony!" Cherry said with another giggle as the hair in question began to trace the lines of her palm, tickling her.

The repertoire of images did not help Lyly any further when she tried to find a memory of a princess or pony with pink hair.

Lyly thought for a moment, seriously considered the fact that despite Cherry's incongruous statement, she was neither princess nor pony.

She furrowed her brow.

Little by little, like ink dissipating into water, brown filaments began to show and grow through the forest of pink. Cherry gasped, childish surprise shaping her face, her hanging mouth and eyes unblinking as the guest's hair slowly changed from a bubble-gum pink to a light chestnut brown.

"...Nooo! Change it back!" Cherry bemoaned after a brief pause of surprise.

The guest reached up to grab a strand of her hair, pulled it long enough so that she could inspect the new color. She pursed her lips, not satisfied, but knowing somehow that she was making the right choice if she wanted to pretend to live by the rules of the land.

"Lyly, I'm headed into town today, do you want to—Mother Mercy!" The farmer named Theodore stopped halfway into his daughter's room, eyes big with surprise but brow furrowed with concern, his expression so exaggerated by pure shock that it made his daughter laugh to see.

"How, uh...did Shaun?—" he paused, utterly bewildered. Then, as he did so frequently with his guest, he simply chose not to think too deeply about it. Maybe Shaun had left some hair dye under sink—it's not like he ever checked.

Lyly watched the man and learned that not only was hair not pink, it did not change colors by itself.

"Ah," he began again after gathering himself. "Lyly, I'm headed into town today, if you wanted to come along and check in with the local police station. Now," he held up a hand to cut off the expected protest despite the fact that his guest had neither moved nor made to speak, "I'm not forcing you to do so. But it's been a few days now, and I'm sure your family is looking for you."

Lyly sat and she stared, as the farmer was learning to expect from her when she was struggling to remember or decide on something. He felt that he was under observation, and he moved to scratch his short hair even though he knew by now that the itch he was feeling dwelt under the skin.

He really should talk to a doctor about that, he thought.

"No, thanks," Lyly said after a minute of consideration, before turning back to the book that was open on her lap. It was a novel, a detective story, one of the few that Shaun had let pile up on her nightstand for when she was in town.