Combs

Why give the comb teeth, that label, as if it’s a small fearful animal flashing it’s snarl and grit?

On the table next to my husband’s chair, two black combs. Calm and peaceful. I lift each one with reverence. Artifact of the ordinary. Relic of the numinous, the small rituals that move a life forward, day by day.

The first combs were likely made of bones and antlers, then wood, sometimes stone. Entombed with Viking warriors and Egyptian dignitaries, some sit on silk in glass cases under special museum lights. Rock stars now, they were meant to be used by the deceased in their after life.

These two black ones are plastic. As a child, it seemed every man had one in a pocket—my father, my step-grandfather, the men sitting in the tavern, their backs to the open door on warm summer days.

Ubiquitous. Remember vocabulary lessons? The weekly list of new words we were fed as schoolkids? Images helped me hold on to meaning, so when I learnt ubiquitous, a black comb popped to mind.

This one has bits of grey whiskers, and what looks like lint. This other one, a slight sheen where the teeth connect to the comb’s spine.

His body oils.

I take the combs to the kitchen sink. I shake fragments of whisker into my palm, closing it, holding the bits before opening my hand again, and with a puff, blowing them into the air.

I’m breathing you in now.

I wash that comb, until it’s clean and shiny. As I start to pass the other comb under the running faucet, I stop.

This comb, with it’s subtle iridescence, is too heavy to wash. Not it’s half-ounce. It’s hallowedness.

Instead I draw the comb through my hair, pulling it down through brown and grey stands, catching little knots, gently teasing them loose. Combing and combing. Collecting long spirals of hair that I pull free, letting layers of my body’s oils linger.

Now this comb and I share a secret. The residue of two lives entwined for decades, held as shimmer in black teeth.