Growing up, we often visited our family cabin built by my great-grandfather. Upon getting to the cabin, my job was to use a small brush to dust off each bunk bed (getting rid of mouse poop and pine needles usually) so that we could make our beds. It was the lower of the tasks on the totem pole, and I usually grumbled about it. Now, my daughter is in charge of the vet same task when we visit the cabin- and she has inherited her attitude about it from her mother.
Like too much bronzer on a politician well beyond his expiration date, the petrified bone below the red hair told the whole sordid story. This vain animal had had hair plugs installed long before it became fashionable. Yes, he had some split ends and the porcupine like feel of the bristles was anything but soft, but my how he stood out among his peers.
Sharpie the echidna had been looking for love for a very, very long time. It seemed that every time Sharpie got close to someone, they withdrew without a reason. Sharpie struggled with this and tried not to take it personally, but it was becoming more and more waring on him. Sharpie thought about walking into the ocean or dropping himself off a precipice. It was a dark time. One day Sharpie caught sight of a strange animal with red spikes, much like his own. Tentatively, Sharpie approached this stranger and felt something he’d never felt before. Sharpie and Smoothie, as the stranger was known, discovered all the things they had in common and fell in love. Now that same sex marriage was legal, Sharpie and Smoothie tied the knot and lived happily ever after.
After a long and arduous life scrubbing the grime and sweat from the horses hides,finally broken and torn there seemed to be nothing left to do. The bristles caught the eye of the old woman and she plucked them, one by one, and saved them to be included in the next batch of salmon flies she tied. Maybe they would work, maybe not but the effort was it’s own reward.
Another. This partial specimen of the red tufted limpet shows both the Tempranillo colored ciliary bundles with the bleached cilia near the distal ends. The length of the cilia can be used almost like carbon dating of the age of this specimen when they expired.
The Fuller Brush Man would arrive every couple of months in my childhood neighborhood. With a specially tricked out suitcase full of every sort of brush you might ever need. Clothes, flange, dust, hair, cleaning, bottle, tooth, mustache, scrub, currying, lint, … it went on and on into every iteration of bristle mounted on paddle. Sometimes he was handsome. Sometimes he was annoying. Sometimes he just came to our door at the perfect/worst/least (or most) convenient time. He was always a man. He was seldom the same man. He always wore a hat. Always, with a smile (sometimes genuine, sometimes genuinely tired and footsore). Here’s the letter opener and some of the beautiful brushes that my mother bought 60 or more years ago. It was a different era.
First, two small leaves.. then..a sudden, brisk autumn gust of wind blew the whole trunk off .
During an afternoon walk on your birthday in the woods outside of town, the place you like to go because the trails wind through tall pines that creak, even when there isn’t a breeze, as if the forest is haunted, you found me, my bristles blazing in the October sun, bright as red licorice. You scrambled up the sandy hill to fetch me, not sure if I was a flower or a weed or perhaps a small bird. Not sure if I was worth the effort. I wasn’t what you expected, was I? Not from the earth or sky. Not a creature that could fly. But you can see I’m well loved. Made for something useful. What was I once? And what am I now becoming, as you hold me in your hands and marvel at how we found each other on this day of all days.
I shouldn’t be pissed. It was her first time getting her hair dyed and she should pick any color she wanted. Maybe a blue like she’d told me I looked great in since she could talk. Maybe she’d spend the whole drive home saying I’ve always wanted pink hair and I’d say it’s perfect and for the rest of the day I would be picturing her years from now as she walks the aisle in pink and as a new mom in pink. She’d decided like I had and my red headed mom on who she was going to be. But no. We hadn’t left the lot. I said Pink! as happy as I could say a color and she said Mom! in a you need to shut up way. Said she dreaded this appointment since I talked about this day five years and 100 questions ago about what color she’d pick. Never wanted to color her hair and decided on the john this morning based on the brush next to the toilet. Thought I should know and sorry she wasn’t strong enough to tell me before I waisted $120. I told her it was fine of course (blue hairs are known for their magnanimity) and we kept it pretty positive for the ride home. I waited til she went next door before I destroyed that f’ing brush and brought the days price of parenting up to $124 lost.
Ice, ice, baby, too cold, too cold. Windshield ice, ice, baby, too cold.
There is always
a giving, not
as a handing away,
not as a transacting
of this to the hand
of that, but
sometimes simply
a holding on until
the time means
releasing to another.
Say, there are flushed
bristles deeply red
with dye
and those bristles
are every bit
the same at their
brittle frayed ends.
Say, in those worked tips,
there is a long hair
brunette and woven
in those bristles.
Say the hair is the point,
waiting as a gift
does in the fingers
of one to be held for
another.
Say the broken bit,
separated from
its whole, became so
simply because
it was meant
to present its gift,
this hair, this story
to be told, to you.
“I’ve got the best teeth. Probably the best ever. Perfect teeth. Ya’know, I made a deal, a deal like no other, probably the best deal ever. I traded a golf course for a solid gold toothbrush, the world’s best toothbrush ever. Probably better than any toothbrush in the galaxy. I use it three… four… probably nine times a day. My teeth are the whitest of all presidents, past and future. The whitest.”
We are still an operational system. We may be frayed at our weathered ends, but our blood courses strong where our feet touch the wooden ground. Let us not forget our intention, nor our ability to work together. Together we can untangle this wretched mess. One bristle alone can not start a revolution.
For who would lose
Though full of pain
This abrasive being
Those bristles which wonder through eternity?
To perish, rather,
Frazzled and lost
in the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of handle and motion?
— Handle Lost (2020)
The landlord had run out of patience. There was no more time for sorting. Now everything was going in the skip. But she was unaware that the suitcase had rotted into the concrete floor. Its contents, spilling out across the shed included a warped copy of Nevermind the Bollocks and a torn denim jacket scribbled with sharpie, a neat row of safety pins along the pocket flap.
“My god!” thought Megan, “Grandpa was a punk!”
Brush Head’s glory days on the Street seemed like yesterday. His beard once bright red now faded and graying at the tips. His expressionless brow worn and splintered, caving in on his dark acorn eyes. Some of his peers had achieved fame, but he was a broken and homeless. Maybe today he’d get word from Kermit.
The caterpillar was born knowing how to transform. She could spin herself into a protective place to do the work needed to come out flying. But the rainforest was burning, oceans were warming and a virus spread across the land. “I’ll wait right here,” she thought. “Until we are ready to do the work to change together.”
Shang wanted desperately to impress the girl, Chunhua, who caught his wandering eye in the village market. But he was afraid. His embarrassment over his brown teeth overwhelmed and discouraged him. Seeking counsel, he visited the elder, Mong, who was wise in all matters spiritual and physical. Mong reassured him that there are no new problems; only new solutions. He handed Shang a device he had discovered in his journey to Song Province. It possessed a wooden handle and stiff bristles from the back of a red boar embedded in one end. Mong instructed Shang to wet the bristles in wet talc paste and rub them with vigor over his stained teeth. In two days, Shang’s bright smile was accepted and returned by Chunhua.
Plake! Plake! I was screaming across the crevasse. The avalanche had come in as we expected it might. Except twice as big. I could see the top of his signature mohawk sticking above the rubble. With great effort
I crawled over. Plake! Hang in there man. The film helicopter had called in the rescue helicopter and I could hear it arriving already. He looked afraid. “Dude!” he said “That was the best day of shredding I’ve ever had! I am honored.” I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. Still, he looked afraid. He reached up and splintered off his Mohawk and handed it to me. “I want you to have this.” Right then I knew he was petrified. As the helicopter airlifted him away I realized this would be one of the strangest days of my life. However the day the rabid pika broke the window and stole this off of the kitchen shelf was certainly a strange day, too. I thought I’d never see it again. How it made its way all the way from the Chugach to Ann arbor is a mystery that would certainly take more than 150 words to explain. I want you to keep it Nick. Because frankly, it’s kind of creepy.
The mole on the left side of my face had grown much larger during the pandemic. I tried to ignore it – thinking that eventually it would go away. I avoided looking directly into mirrors – the one in the bathroom and the full-length in my bedroom. One day while I was on an important phone call with a client, in my periphery I clearly saw the mole reach over and turn off my phone. “What the hell”, I yelled to no one. Not believing what I had seen, I called the client back. The mole did it again and this time I heard it say, “No!” Somehow, some way – it had become a thing and developed a personality.
It was all I had left of her in some physical way, Shirley(my Grandmother), or “Gia” as my sister used to call her when she was too young to pronounce “Grandma” properly. She lived simply after my grandfather passed away, although she took so much pride in the small cabin they had built with their own hands when they were first together-he was a carpenter, but she always had far more vision for how to make things feel like “home”. She cared for all of their meager possessions so well, constantly cleaning, polishing what little they had, and had always found great joy in making these little “tools” to really get the job done-to her high standards. From the tiny cracks in the baseboard trim that were impossible to get dust out of, to the place where the sole connected to the shoe, that is what kept her up at night. Always inventing these tiny little cleaning tools, making them out of found sticks, bits of dried grasses, even carefully clipping the coarse hair from their dog for this little “duster” as she liked to call it.
It was my friend’s birthday and I was going to wish him well and buy him a little gift. I was thinking maybe a bottle of wine or a big box of chocolates. But then I saw this request to write a short piece about a brush. The brush was butt ugly, one of the ugliest brushes I think I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know much about the brush. I had no idea who it belonged to and I didn’t even know what it could be used for. It couldn’t brush hair or sweep up debris. I wondered about what kind of story I could write. Once upon a time there was a brush. Well, I thought for a good long while and came up empty. Wouldn’t he rather have chocolate? This is a really strange time. I’m six feet from every one I know, I’m wearing a mask two weeks before Halloween, and I’m trying to write a story about an ugly brush.
Fuller’s dream had always been to have a Mohawk. He saw no reason to abandon it because of his age. Upon retirement from door-to-door sales, he embraced it as though he were sixteen.
Lonely well groomed but weathered spiky object looking for same. Walks on the beach? Museums filled with Dutch art? A love of tropical fruit and lacquer? Maybe a perfect fit! Stick note through keyhole in door. No synthetics