A man with a bent back and hands that are curled like claws, unable to straighten and stained black and brown with dirt and scar tissue, tells him to cut his hair.
“It makes you stand out, Doctor. If you want the guards to stop singling you out, you need to cut it off. Look like everybody else.”
Parmak ignores what the man says, half because he refuses to cut his hair, and half because he’s terrified of the man who has been here, working in the pit for over a decade. He’s half-mad and sometimes lashes out at the other prisoners, and he doesn’t want to fight with him. The man is bent and appears shriveled and thin but is still far stronger than Parmak.
Parmak is getting stronger, though. He’s leaner than he’s been since he was a young student, but it’s only partially the smoothness of muscle, and just as much an effect of his new and scarce diet. He’s also dirtier than he’s ever been, since he was a child.
He’s considered cutting his hair, because it’s caked with dust and tangled into knots no matter how careful he is with putting it into tight braids and buns and he can smell his own oily sweat on it when he sleeps, sour to his nostrils. He’s learned to live with the smell, though.
But he won’t cut his hair, because he hasn’t cut his hair short since he was in school and he won’t cut it short just so that the guards can pick a new target to harass. He’ll run his fingers through it at night and pick out tangles by hand, and he’ll spend precious few cleaning times pulling the dirt out of it, because it’s his.
Someday, someday before long, he will be in a clean room, and he will bathe alone. With real water, and real soap, and he’ll scrub his scalp until it feels clean and he’ll put his hair in a long, beautiful plait and three years in this dirty, dusty hellhole filled with people slowly decaying from the inside out will not have broken him.
And his hair will be clean.