By Gerri Brightwell

This balding man, how carefully he runs the razor over the old woman’s head. Hair gathers in her lap, gray and unlovely, while the crowd hoots at the sight of her naked scalp emerging. Someone calls out, Traitor! Another, Shame! The man’s lived long enough to have anticipated what would happen: the Germans gone, the town’s people wild for revenge.

He leans close, tongue between his teeth as he shears a strand from above her ear. The razor grates, and she flinches. The blade’s dull from shaving the heads of the women lined up nearby, shivering in their slips: the ones taken to dinner by officers while the town’s people went hungry; the prostitutes who opened their legs for any man who could pay; the others, younger, mothers even, who let the enemy have them up against the wall behind the market, or in the backroom of a bar, for nothing more than a new dress or a loaf of bread.

Where the razor’s snagged it’s left the woman’s scalp a speckled pink. Tiny shreds of skin cling to the blade, and his throat tightens. He wipes them away and tells himself he volunteered for this, he’s used to dealing with women—he sells them their dresses, their undergarments, their hosiery. One shove and the woman’s on her feet, and he calls out, Look at her, this bitch who worked for them as a cleaner, who took their filthy money! The woman cowers. Her slip’s dingy, her old breasts sagging behind it, her legs so thin it’s a wonder they hold her up. He turns away from the sight of her to bellow, We must teach these women a lesson, every one last one of them!

The crowd surging forward is a terrifying sight, enough to make him wish for this evening when he’ll close himself away in the stillness of his shop where dozens and dozens of lovely dresses hang on their racks, and just who can afford them now that the enemy has gone?