Rest and Be Thankful

by Emma Glass

The towel in real life is small, flimsy, flutters in the breeze blowing up sand, spreading sprinkles everywhere, sand landing in unwanted places. My sister and I had matching towels, bright red, blue and yellow, a primary beach scene, a sun, a sea, a bucket and spade, wrapping round and round and round us when our bodies were small, the softness of the towel tickling sun-kissed areas, chafing chapped sandy bottoms. But as we grew, they did not, we sat on them for as long as we could. And then they became towels for hair dyeing at home. My mother’s soft brown perm became woven with white. She would sigh loudly with each sighting of a new silver streak. And every few weeks she would stand at the bathroom sink, staring in the mirror, dolloping dye on to her head, piling her hair high, scooping and swirling her hair up foamy and creamy. She’d call out to me for the towel to be passed, I’d press it on her shoulders, she was a whipped-cream queen. A catalogue of her dyeing. The towels were marked with the colours of her years. At first, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, redder to mahogany, mouse brown, BLONDE. Washed out by white, she admitted defeat. Blonde at her age? The time came to be gracefully grey. We called it silver. The hair stripped of its thickness by the chemical fix. Thin on top, threadbare like the ancient towels. But not dead yet. The towels live on, a third life in the rags hanging in my father’s shed.