Rapunzel HairFall's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Rapunzel sat on a purple iron chair beside the striped funnel cake cart and tried not to move. Her brown hair, longer than she was tall, spilled off the chair and across the cobblestones in a tangled brown river dotted with purple bows. Somewhere in that river, the creature was hiding. She had decided, three days ago, that she would tame it. She had not decided how to do it without losing the rest of her grandmother's ribbons. The creature was a small white chameleon, no bigger than her hand. It had climbed her hair the moment she stepped into this place, and it had not stopped climbing since. Every time she stood, her hair dragged behind her and snagged on table legs, cart wheels, flower beds, anything with an edge. Every snag yanked the chameleon. Every yank made it panic. It would thrash, claws hooking deeper, and bolt up another arm of her hair, tangling it worse. This morning she had walked from her tower to the square and left a trail anyone could follow. Brown hair lay snarled across the stones behind her, knotted around a chair leg, looped through a flower bed, threaded with bows pulled loose and crushed flat. One bow was missing entirely. She had counted. That made seven. She set a small plate of cake on the cobblestones and waited. The chameleon's head poked from a coil near her knee. It watched the cake. It watched her. She did not reach for it. The last time she reached, it bolted, and her hair caught the cart wheel, and the cart rolled, and a bow tore free and lifted on the wind. She had watched it go. Somewhere out past the square, one of her grandmother's ribbons was drifting through empty air, curling on itself, carried farther than she could ever walk. She spoke to the chameleon the way she would speak to a frightened cat. She told it she was going to cut her hair. She said it out loud so she would have to do it. Then she took the small scissors from the table and, very slowly, gathered the trailing length into her lap. The chameleon did not run. It crept onto her wrist and watched the blades. She cut above the longest tangle. The weight fell away in one heavy coil, bows and knots and dragged grit all together, and landed on the stones with a soft thump. Her hair now ended at her ankles. The chameleon sat on her wrist, still. She lifted it carefully to her shoulder, and it stayed. Nothing snagged. Nothing thrashed. On the ground beside her chair lay a long brown rope of her own hair, six bows knotted into it, and somewhere far above the square, a seventh bow she would never get back.