The Headdress

Shanti Weiland

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If it were a gift, the girl could not recall the giver, but it did belong to her. In the mornings, she placed it on her small head and the silver disks lightly clinked like coins. When she wore the headdress, everyone wanted to help her, to please her, just so they could watch its prisms delight her face with rainbows. But when they stared too long, they began to feel ownership and soon mistook the colors for something they could catch—a school of fish, blinking under clear water. Their nails nicked her face, and although they paid her full attention, they did not see her at all.

The other girls were jealous, only seeing boys’ attention (often, grown men) but not from inside the headdress, fingers gripping. The girls begrudged her, but when they tried on the headdress, late at night, when it lay alone and shimmering on the table, it slipped right off their heads or scraped their scalps. No, the headdress belonged only to her.

Sometimes she liked wearing it, extra smiles, lingering glances; other times, she stared at it from across the room, afraid it would move on its own and possess her. But on her twelfth birthday, the headdress fit perfectly, and she could no longer remove it. From then on, when she left the house, she covered it with a dark hoodie, hoping to run her errands without incident. From the outside, she looked like a deer in a cloak, antlers pointing the way. The men bore forward.

On job interviews and dates, though, she revealed her headdress, just a little, and she prospered and wondered.

She could not find peace either way.

As she aged, so did the headdress. It sagged in front, prisms hanging just out of sunlight’s reach. The ribbons faded. Once in a while, people remarked how beautiful it must have been and reached, but did not touch, the fragile filigree. She missed it. Sometimes. Mostly she enjoyed walking by the bay, greeting her neighbors and relishing that their waves were only for her and not for the headdress. If they noticed it at all, they dismissed the dark sheen of its feathers, now a bit sparse.

When she died, the headdress tumbled from her crown and into the sea. She lay on the bow of a rocking ship, and people held her wrinkled hands. The purple sunset glittered as it slipped, unnoticed, into the fold of waves.

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Shanti Weiland’s second book, Cracked Planet, is forthcoming from Negative Capability Press. Her first book, Sister Nun, was the 2015 winner of the Negative Capability Press Book Competition, judged by Amy King. Weiland is currently writing a book of poems about Star Trek: The Next Generation and hosts the web corner, Online Enlightenment. She teaches English at The University of Alabama and lives in Birmingham with her wife and pets.

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