Part 71

Quin stood with the silver hairbrush in his trembling hands as he was overcome by a sudden and forceful wave of emotion. He sank onto Alisen's bed and soon her quilt was studded with his tears. He did not understand why he had come into her room to talk to her, nor why he had suddenly gotten the peculiar urge to brush her hair. It was a habit of his around his sister, for she often ran around with her friends in the woods until his mother called her inside for supper. At home Quin did not have many chores under his mother, save helping to prepare and clean up the meals. And so, when Ros gave him the duty of tackling his sister's tangle of hair after each playful day out with her friends, he was happy to oblige. He would sit beside her on her bed and begin by patiently pulling all the crackling orange leaves from the fall seasons from her hair, or the tender green ones, as she babbled on about her day to him. He would nod and make small little noises of agreement at her words, as he reached for their mother's hand-made wooden brush and began to pull it through the windswept hair before him. He would work gingerly, using his fingers to ease out the most stubborn knots. It became almost a sort of therapy for him, those nights spent in his sister's room with the wooden hairbrush and the even stream of his sister's voice.
Quin sat on Alisen's bed now, face-down, remembering. He had reached for the brush on auto-pilot, his body trying to get him to relax, sensing the exhaustion of his mind.
Quin certainly felt exhausted. He shifted his head so that only his cheek was pressed to the wet quilt. His eyes focused on the blue walls of the bedroom, then unfocused. Closed. Sleep came easily.