slept. In the front, the salon girls blow-dried and hotcombed and slathered lye on recalcitrant kink. They held lighters to the ends of braided wig extensions to keep them from unravelling, rolling them between spit-dampened fingers. The whole place reeked of burning – electrical, frictional, chemical – Sylvia’s girls sifting varieties of incineration as indifferently as demon drones in hell.
