Rapunzel's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Rapunzel needed to brush her hair before the sun went down, but she could not find one clear spot to sit. Her hair ran seventy feet across the floor. It looped the table legs, buried the hearth, and slid under the door into the next room. She held her brush and stared. There was nowhere to begin. She took one step. Her heel caught a thick coil, and she stumbled into the wall. Above her, a shelf tipped. A clay cup fell and cracked on the floor. "Not again," she said. She had swept the same broken clay three days running. Her hair snagged everything the moment she moved. She knelt and worked the brush through the nearest strands. The bristles stuck at once. Knots pulled tight where the hair had dragged over the rough boards. Each tug hurt. She could not free one section without tangling another. The little house had three rooms, and her hair filled them all. Rapunzel dropped the brush and rubbed her sore scalp. The problem was not the hair. The problem was the floor. She needed height. She needed a place to sit while her hair fell somewhere else, away from the boards and the table legs. Her eyes moved to the far corner. The tall bed stood there, wide and carved, with four thick posts and a canopy overhead. It rose high off the ground. If she climbed onto it, her hair would spill down the sides and pool below. It would hang free instead of catching on furniture. She gathered an armful of hair and dragged it toward the bed. It fought her the whole way. Strands hooked the table one last time before she yanked them loose. She climbed onto the thick bedding and sat in the center. Then she pulled the rest of her hair up after her. It worked. The long blonde length slid off the edges of the mattress and dropped to the floor in smooth folds. No table legs. No hearth. No rough boards to snag it. Rapunzel sat on the soft bed with a clear lap and open space around her. For the first time all week, she had room to work. She lifted the brush and pulled it through a strand. It ran clean to the end. She smiled and reached for the next. Then she looked down and stopped smiling. Even from up high, her hair reached the floor and kept going. It spread across the boards in a wide golden mass. The bed gave her a place to sit. It did not make the hair shorter. Seventy feet was still seventy feet. She could reach the strands near her, but the far ends lay yards away, past the door and into the next room. To brush all of it, she would have to move the whole length up onto the bed somehow. And it weighed more than she could lift at once.