She’d been here before. The slow drain. The way the soap suds clung to her ankles instead of swirling away. The quiet, insidious rebellion of a thousand lost hairs.
Because some battles weren’t about glory. They were about keeping your ankles dry.
She didn’t pull blindly. That only broke the hair into smaller pieces, driving them deeper. Instead, she took a plastic zip tie, snipped tiny notches along its edge with scissors, and slid it into the drain. A few gentle twists, and the hair wrapped around it like yarn on a spindle. Then, slowly, she withdrew it.
It was Sunday morning, the kind with pale light slipping through the bathroom blinds and the faint sound of birds pretending the city wasn’t waking up. Nora stepped into the shower, turned the knob, and watched the water pool around her toes like a lazy, reluctant lake.