On "City Girls" by LiAnn Yim (4116 words) ****

I love this seeming randomness of this story, the way we start off with this absurd idea that there's a man going around town cutting off women's hair, that this is terrifying, a reason to avoid salons. I thought I was reading some kind of absurdist story, and then, no, I wasn't. I was reading a story about the kind of games, the kind of obsessions, the kind of misunderstandings, that children sometimes have, the kind that make me wonder, for example, now whether my memories of the 210 freeway in Pasadena not being finished until I was about age four and about that trench being used, for a time, to catch floodwater are simply my child fantasies confused with real history of the place I grew up. Then Yim wanders off into fights between friends and fallings out and some growing up that happens and all of this somehow once again brought back to hair, which is what's important to these girls. Read the story here at Fwriction.