On a great brow of land there was a village; below the village gaped a thing called “Eye,” so the village called itself “Eyebrow.” The villagers grew from the soil of this brow, and when the young ones asked the older, “How are we called?” they were told, “We are Hair,” and the young ones sang out, “Hair!” and pointed to the moon, which was in the seventh house. In this village, black hairs rose from the brow, but there were brows whose villagers grew redly; there were also brown brows and some villagers who were blond, and forgetful.
The young villagers waved, curled and flattened against the prominence on which they rode, while the older villagers muttered. The young hairs stretched up to reach the height of the older ones, and asked them, “What does the world hold for us?”
“It holds … wait: we don’t know,” said the elders. “We have always been rooted to the place we first grew. Some among us venture out into the world, but they never come back, so we have no clue. ‘Pluck’ is the only thing we know of, outside of this village.”
“Pluck?” The younger hairs were curious. “Like, ‘Pluck, The Magic Dragon,’ who lived by the sea?”
“No,” said the elders, “that was ‘Puff,’ and he was a metaphor, not a dragon.”
“Meta for what?” asked the babies, but the elders busied themselves, muttering.
So the hairs grew and waved and sang and curled and flattened on the brow until one day, a strange and ordinary thing happened: a new hair poked through the soil of the brow. A new hair was the ordinary thing, but this hair was strange because it was white. “Let’s dance,” said the white hair, and the older hairs said that they did not dance, could not be footloose, for they were rooted to the soil and could only move as the brow did. “And,” said the elders, “we are afraid that ‘Pluck’ might get us.”
“The Magic Dragon?” asked the white hair. “No!” barked the elders. “Pluck! It takes the white hairs!” When the white hair asked why, the elders explained, “Because they’re white.”
“I am also curly, and you are straight (not that I have anything against that) so is it possible that this ‘Pluck’ likes curlies?”
“No,” huffed the other hairs, impatient with the white hair’s naiveté, “for we have at times been curly. ‘Pluck’ sees as we do, in black and white; he takes only the white.”
“But that village over there has nothing but red hairs,” said the white hair. “Do they see in red and white?” And the elders said, “We’re getting off-topic, here! The danger is not in how we see, but the fact that you are white! We were born un-white, and ‘Pluck’ has not taken us.” The white hair asked, “Where will I go?” The elders sighed, then cried: “We don’t know! We have never been away from this BROW!” The white hair straightened up and said, “Then, let’s dance,” and began slam-dancing against the other hairs.
Suddenly, the village heaved upward as the brow arched beneath it. A great wind flattened the black hairs against the brow, leaving the proud white hair wiggling alone. “Pluck! Pluck!” cried the villagers. Two great steel arms appeared in the sky, descended and clamped onto the dancer. The soil of the village bulged upward as the hair was yanked into the air.
The villagers gathered in the space the white hair had occupied, and each one made a commitment to never, ever, dance.