Let Down Your Hair

Delicately, I dipped the soft bristles of my new paintbrush into thick oil-based paint, a deep royal blue, and watched as it smeared across a broad expanse of wall.

With smaller brushes I added the finer details, the outlines of indents in soft wood and window frames, door handles. Smears of yellow and messy black lines showed a little lantern light on top of a blue phone box.

In the beginning, I painted the little yellow lights in expanses of purple sky above green hills, but that got boring.

So I painted the lights above oceans, in caves, drifting over deserts.

And I still got bored of it all.

I can’t tell you when the landscapes began to morph into something else – or why they morphed into that something else in the first place. All I can tell you is that the feeling that came over me when I stepped back from the wall and saw this thing, this strange box with the little yellow light seeming to keep it afloat among the stars, I couldn’t stop.

When I finished my painting, I cleaned off my brushes beneath the cool steam of the faucet and dumped the murky-looking paint water from my (only) window.

Then I turned and looked, only for a second. A brief second of the strangest feeling of euphoria, like I was being reunited with something I used to hold dear to my heart.

Beside my latest creation I had scribbled my name, only the first, in curlicue script. Honestly, how many other people can be named Rapunzel?

The signature painted with a careful hand next to my name wasn’t so much a signature as it was a strange series of symbols; golden curves and circles and lines that felt like they were supposed to be words, but weren’t. I saw it in my head, clear as polished crystal, but no matter how many times I painted it, nothing happened.

Something should.

After all, isn’t that what the alphabet is? Some twisted and curved lines designed to encompass concepts beyond our wildest imaginations and simplify them.

As I turned away, I noticed tiny tracks of paint trailing from my easel all the way to the windowsill, disappearing into the stray vine of a plant resting there.

The corners of my mouth picked up with a smile as I tiptoed over, my hair trailing in a train behind me, to a green leaf that was hanging particularly low, and seemed to have the remarkable characteristic of paint smears.

“Pascal,” I said to the tiny chameleon, and I giggled when his eyes flashed open and his skin returned to its normal color, darker than grass and lighter than leaves. His tiny little feet were coated in blue and gold paint, and I rolled my eyes. “Did I or did I not tell you not to track paint around the tower?”

Pascal blinked and moved arms (can you even call them that?) in an innocent gesture, as if he had absolutely nothing to do with this situation.

Typical chameleon. So indecisive.

“Rapunzel! Let down your hair!” I perked up almost immediately as I heard my mother’s singsong voice from the base of the tower. Gathering up my hair, I wrapped it around a hook I used to hang a flowerpot on and tossed the rest outside, the strands falling in a yellow shimmering waterfall.

“Coming, Mother!” I felt the gentle tug that signaled she was ready to be pulled up and grabbed my hair like it was rope, the sunlight pouring in the window and warming my skin.

My mother was different in the way that everything she does is dramatic. If she could be considered anything, it would be over the top and flashy.

As she swung a leg over the window ledge, tugging maybe a little harder than she needed to, she greeted me with a thin-lipped smile.

“Hello, Flower,” Mother said, her voice reminding me of hot chocolate that had been left to long to cool. With slender fingers she pulled her black velvet hood off her hair, which was long and waved but growing silver. The removal of her cape revealed the smooth shimmery fabric of her red dress.

Mother always had the nicest things.

Self-consciously, I tugged at the string keeping my corset-top together. The ends were looking a little worn and frayed from constant washing.

“How are you, darling?” Mother cupped her hands, which were starting to wrinkle a little bit, around my face. She smoothed a lock of blond hair behind my ear.

“Just fine, Mother.”

“Good, good. Now, bring this basket to the kitchen, will you? I brought your favorite!” Mother lowered her voice to a playful whisper. “We’re going to make hazel nut soup!”

As I took the basket, Mother draped her riding cape on a wooden hook.

“Oh Rapunzel, I do wish you’d actually start wearing shoes,” she commented flippantly, staring at her reflection in the mirror. I had painted the frame for her birthday months ago, but Mother chose to leave it here because it was ‘much too heavy’ to bring back with her.

I tried not to let it show how much that cut at me.

In the kitchen, I set the basket down on the cobbled counter and cringed. “It’s not like I ever go outside anyway,” I mumbled.

“What was that?” Mother snapped, focusing her penetrating gaze on me. I could feel myself withering beneath it, like I was nothing more than a flower crushed beneath her shoe. “You know I hate the mumbling, Rapunzel.”

“Nothing!” I responded quickly, my voice shaking with nervous tremors. All I could see were the items I was taking from the basket, like they were suddenly the most interesting things I’d ever seen.

Which, considering I’ve never set foot outside of this tower, isn’t much of a feat.

Mother appraised me critically for a moment before her eyes landed somewhere behind me and she brightened up.

“Rapunzel, dear, get me a chair and brush, will you? I’ve had a long journey and I’m quite exhausted. You don’t want to have to take care of my old and decrepit body, do you?”

“Of course!” I scrambled for a chair and my silver brush, tucked inside of a box inscribed with another series of strange symbols.

What? How did I not notice that before?

Mother relaxed into the plush cushion of the chair, caressing my hair as if it were the most precious thing in the world to her.

Sometimes I wondered if she loved my hair more than she loved me. She couldn’t, right?

“You know what to do, Flower,” Mother said softly, already running the brush through my hair. I sighed contentedly, leaning my back against her knees. Then the simple melody spilled from my mouth.

“Flower, gleam and glow
Let your power shine
Make the clock reverse
Bring back what once was mine.”

The room began to glow, golden light splashing the walls. It was the kind of picture that I wanted to recreate, but I could never get the colors just right. I always opened my eyes for this part because it was my favorite. My hair (which had the habit of getting tangled up in the strangest places) lit up like string of Christmas lights, hanging from rafters and draping across furniture.

“Heal what has been hurt
Change the Fates' design
Save what has been lost
Bring back what once was mine
What once was mine.”

The song died out on my lips and the golden light faded from the room. Mother let out a relieved sigh, dropping the brush in her lap.

Then the air in the room grew tense and quiet. “Rapunzel,” Mother said quietly. Her words thinly veiled the storm brewing beneath. I couldn’t make myself turn and look at her. “What are those symbols?” Mother pointed a youthful hand at my painting of the blue box hovering in a swirl of galaxies, and the strange circles beside it.

I stood and walked toward the wall, placing my palm up against the wall beside the symbol.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, because I didn’t.

“I don’t appreciate being lied to, Rapunzel,” Mother answered sharply. Her dark eyes narrowed in on me.

I pursed my lips, trying to pick the right words. “Mother, don’t you ever dream?”

“Rapunzel I don’t see how this answers my question—”

“You see this?” I said, pointing at the blue box and the symbols. “I see these symbols in my head, I see all of these… images in my head and I don’t know what to make of them!” My gaze shifts dreamily over to the window, the sun beginning to set over the top of the trees. “Maybe if…” I bit my lip so hard I could have sworn I tasted blood. “Maybe if I left the tower, if I learned more about the world, I could figure out what this,” I gestured largely to the biggest wall of murals. “All means. Every time I close my eyes I see these symbols floating around my head, and those yellow lanterns float by every year on my birthday and I just can’t get rid of the feeling that they’re somehow connected, Mother.” I stared down at my feet, curling my toes into the cold marble tiling. “I just want to make sense of things, please. Let me leave.”

Mother started laughing wildly, catching me by surprise. I looked up at her, incredulous.

“So that’s what you want?” She laughed again, a peal of bells run by a madman. “You want to leave, that’s it? Oh, I should have expected this. Dear, dear Rapunzel wants to leave.” Mother swept around the room as if she were looking for something. “How do you expect to survive out there, hm? You’re a little girl wearing too-small dresses and no shoes with dozens of feet of hair. And you know what people will do to you once they find out what your hair can do?” She smiled grimly at me, striking a chord of fear in my heart. “They’ll hurt you, Flower. They might even kill you.”

“I’m almost eighteen now, I can handle myself,” I said bravely, picking up my head and sticking out my chin.

“Fine, fine then!” Mother glared at me, a terrifying smile spreading across her face.

She walked purposefully over to my paints, picking up a large tub of white made from the crushed shells she found for me on the beach last year.

“You think you can handle yourself in the real world, Rapunzel? I’d like to see you try!”

I realized what she was going to do before she did it, but I was helpless to stop her.

I screamed as the white paint was thrown over my largest painting, destroying it. Tears streamed down my face and I fell to my knees, resting my head in my hands. Why? Why would she do that? Why would she destroy the one thing I’ve worked so hard on?

I felt like someone had just punched a gaping hole in my chest, ripping out my heart and stomping on it in the process.

Amid my sobs, Mother strolled over to me. “Oh dear, now I’m the bad guy.” She clucked her tongue and crouched down beside me. “Promise me you’ll never ask to leave this tower or paint those pictures again.”

I had no choice. She was my mother. She always knew what was best, that’s what mothers were for, right?

I choked out an okay, and I heard one last chuckle from her direction.

Then she was gone.

Much later, when the sun had set and the white paint had dried, I heard a noise.

It was a terrible noise, it sounded like two mechanical things grinding together in a way they shouldn’t.

Right when the noise stopped, it was followed with a loud crash, a thud so loud it shook the entire tower down to it’s foundation. My little figurines and knick-knacks fell off shelves and shattered and I stood in a panic, my body flooded with fear. Was this the danger that Mother spoke about?

I spun, and there, in the corner, I saw it.

The blue box with the tiny yellow light from my paintings.

I was so frozen in place that I didn’t expect the front door to open – I didn’t even expect anyone to be inside!

A man wearing odd clothes and bow tie that seemed to be smoking gripped the door as if it were life or death. He had a strange-looking device in his hand with a glowing green tip.

“Well this certainly isn’t what I expected….” He observed in a daze, his voice thick with some accent I’d never heard before.

He then proceeded to collapse into a heap on the floor, a tangle of limbs.

Only one thought was managing to make it through my head.

The blue box is real.