---

A Relationship in Four Haircuts

By Ai Jiang

---

You met him on Etsy.

That’s right.

Not a dating app, but an online marketplace for small business owners.

You’d asked about a custom jade ring you’d been sniffing around for but never found one within your budget—until him. But what you didn’t expect was for him to break from his professional persona and ask for your hand in marriage with the same ring you were trying to purchase for $20.99 with 15% discount on top to boot. The ring was probably a knock-off, but still.

It had to be a joke, the proposal, surely, because your username had been CATSONLY_ and your profile picture was that of your British Short Hair’s belly. And he? Well, his seller’s name was BOUJEEMAN96, in a subtle but not so subtle attempt to hide the implied “69”, or maybe he was actually born in 1996.

And so begins your relationship, your Shakespearean tragedy, disguised as a romantic comedy.

HAIRCUT I: The Unruly and Uncut

BOUJEEMAN96 said he’ll give you the ring for free if you meet up with him for one date. And you agree because he’s a 4.93-star seller with over ten thousand ratings, so surely he must be safe. Or maybe, you’re just that lonely, though it isn’t something you like to admit, yet the thought often persists like a hungry mosquito.

You comb your hand through your hair several times at home, pat it down with some water, grumble about the greasy strands and unruly kinks, check your teeth to see if you had anything left from lunch stuck near the canines. Then rinse, satisfied.

A message from BOUJEEMAN96: Can’t wait to see you soon.

Even though you gave him your number, he still messages you from Etsy, using his seller profile. At least if you go missing you have this as evidence.

Another ping.

He resent the address of where the two of you will be meeting and a picture of himself in a nice dress shirt and slacks with his face cropped off with the message “a surprise” *wink*

“what a tease” I reply

As soon as you close your phone, your heartbeat chokes you. You weren’t planning on wearing anything fancier than shorts and a plain black t-shirt, but that would mean arriving underdressed in comparison, and you can’t have that. And your hair—oh goodness.

In your closet, you find a floral skirt decorated in cat fur; it’s too big for you, but it will have to do. With pins, you secure the dress around your waist, scrunching up the fabric to make the ruffles look like part of the design rather than a last-ditch effort at being presentable.

There are still a couple of hours left before your meeting, but you head out early anyhow. The hairdresser shouldn’t be too busy at this time. 3 p.m. Most people will be on their afternoon break.

You walk into the salon. You’re not the type to cut your hair, but you’re also not the type to look in the mirror if you can help it. The limp, frizzed strands have hung to your waist for a number of years; even a trim was too traumatizing for you. But today, for BOUJEEMAN96, you ask them to take off the split ends. You assume they would only take an inch, but it is much more than that, and you’re left with hair hanging just below the pits, barely long enough to hide whatever sweat stains might manifest themselves throughout the day, before your date, during the date, drenched long after the date. You try to pull your hair forward to hide yourself, slouching to make it seem longer.

This was a mistake.

Maybe you can cancel the date, wait until your hair grows back. But maybe then, another customer seeking discounted jade rings might catch BOUJEEMAN96’s attention, and then your hair won’t matter anyway.

At 6 p.m. sharp, you walk into Thai Express, look around, and there he is waving at you, even though he’s never met you in his life. Or maybe, you are the only one who never met him, never realized that the two of you had somehow bumped into one another at some point, and that your Etsy username was clearly stamped on your forehead because of how much fur is still stuck on your outfit: CATSONLY_.

Nice hair, he says when you approach.

Thanks, you say. Got it cut today.

This feels familiar, even though it isn’t.

You show him a picture of what it looked like before the trim, when it brushed the small of your back, more unruly, and hope he might appreciate the lengths—no pun intended—you went through for this date, for him.

And his smile wanes.

Oh, is all he says. You looked better with the long hair. I like women with long hair. I mean, I guess shorter hair is okay too, but if it’s short, much shorter is better, you know? Like a cute pixie cut or something. I think that might suit you.

He doesn’t look at your hair again the entire time he speaks about his small business on Etsy. And half his words don’t register because you’re too busy thinking about when you can drop by the salon again to get a pixie cut and how much it’d complement the sharpness of his statue-like nose.

By the end of the date, he asks to see you again. He even says he’ll pick you up from your place, maybe a nearby station if you aren’t comfortable giving him your address. He’s so considerate, so you tell him there is a convenience store down the street from your place, and that 9 p.m. is fine.

A bit late, but it’s fine.

HAIRCUT II: The Pixie

Your hairdresser is fully booked until next month, but your next date with BOUJEEMAN96 is this coming weekend.

On the date, you’d never asked for each other’s names, nor used your usernames. But the mystery makes him feel far more alluring, and in the mystery, you yourself could hide the fact that you were struggling to stay afloat and that your dead cat had never been replaced even after your mourning concluded. Not because you couldn’t allow another kitten in your heart but because you couldn’t afford another.

And the saddest part, when you realized just how much of companionship is bought, was that even your neighbour refused to make small talk when you happened to get in the elevator at the same time. It was the one time only, and it was as though they tried to miss you every time after. You felt bad, bought them a fruit basket, a peace gesture with a small card attached. Suddenly, they appear in the elevator the next day, and you haven’t stopped leaving fruit baskets every now and then since.

In the bathroom, you have threads wrapped around your finger like a noose. Your mother taught you how to thread your own eyebrows when you were twelve, but you had a habit of making them always far too thin. And always, always, you’d break skin but never muscle. But it shows—a bruise, a vicious kiss that sometimes beads with blood, and is sometimes very difficult to hide.

But you risk it anyhow—the caress, the tease, never quite a strangle when you start threading the fine fuzz beneath your chin, along your jaw, just above the collarbone at the delicate, veined skin of your neck.

If this is what it means to flirt with death, perhaps this is your way of doing so without ever committing to the relationship. A tragedy with the darkest of humours, and unironically also with the unbalancing of the body’s humours.

But this is a romantic comedy, you’re convinced.

Now, the hair.

You pull up the highest viewed YouTube tutorial and set it up against a long-expired bottle of moisturizer. Your skin hadn’t reacted poorly to it yet, so why not keep using it. You hover over the sink and hack at your hair unceremoniously.

The YouTuber makes it look so easy, but of course, you have no way of knowing just how many takes they needed to make this video, and whether their hair is their actual hair or several wigs they’ve purchased to create this illusion of professional perfection.

The sink fills with locks you chopped off, and instead of mopping the strands up with your hands and disposing them in the garbage, you try to wash them down the drain, and of course, it clogs. And instead of trying to unclog the sink, you hop in the shower with the scissors and a handheld mirror, the shower still steamy from your rinse, and you continue without the video.

More hair falls. Then the mirror slips from your hand, falls onto the shower floor, shatters. The fragments slice at your legs, some cuts deeper than others. Strands of hair spider across the broken shards like surgery scars. Your legs start to give, and you contemplate in those brief seconds simply falling onto the broken mirror—but you don’t. You hurl yourself out of the shower as you collapse.

In the handful of days remaining leading up to the date, you snip impulsively at the pixie cut that looks more like an uneven bob—sometimes when you first wake with your eyes still bleary, sometimes after a meal when you head to the bathroom and catch a glimpse of the choppy style in the mirror, sometimes during the middle of the night when you can’t sleep, and small pieces of fallen hair from a recent snip scratch at your cheeks like nails on your pillow.

On the day of the date, he snaps a picture of himself in a different dress shirt and light-washed jeans. You don’t have enough money for another dress, but you buy one on discount anyway, also on Etsy—ironically from a seller named BOUJEEFASHION, and you wonder if they might somehow be related to your date—and it is the one you’re wearing when you snap a picture of yourself in response to his own.

BOUJEEMAN96 writes “I’m not sure if the pixie cut suits you ”

“you said it would”

When he messages back, you remember why you had sworn off love, but at the same time, he saves your disappointment almost instantly by giving you further hope, even if it does trigger some irritation, yet you can’t tell if the irritation is from the itchiness of your scalp or from his words.

“Maybe with some colour, pink, maybe. Would complement your skin” *wink*

And that was that. Tragedy returning to a rightful romantic comedy.

After your date at Taco Bell, you go to the convenience store to buy a box of pink hair dye and several boxes of bleach lightener, unbranded, because those are on sale.

This time, for sure, you’d coax a straight compliment from him. After all, he did drop you off with a kiss.

Next date is in a week’s time, at 10 p.m.

HAIRCUT III: The Bleached and Dyed

Back in the bathroom, bleach mixed, hair dye on standby, you snip at your hair once more before getting started. The gloves that come with the box mixes are too big, but you make it work. The sink is still clogged, but the shower is cleared of glass at least, so you sit, cross-legged, on the shower floor, naked, with nothing on but an old raincoat you no longer use as you work the bleach into your hair.

First it tingles, then there is a slight burn. You can’t remember if the instructions tell you to use shampoo and conditioner or not, having recycled it prematurely, so you do. But when you get out of the shower, the orange that blasts from the roots of your hair screams failure. You don’t wait for it to air dry; you blow dry it instead, alternating between hot and cold air just so you don’t burn off your ears.

Next box of bleach.

Leave it on for longer.

This time it burns.

This time your roots cry.

The skin from your scalp and around the roots begin to flake by the time you work in the pink dye. That stings too, and you are not sure if hair dye is supposed to sting, or if you now have an open wound on your head. Your hair clumps at the ends, the strands clinging to each other for dear life before the roots are no longer reliable refuge.

Hair falls.

Sink clogs again.

Scissors return when you realize the blow dryer is no longer drying your hair, and it seems like your hair is getting increasingly wetter the more you try to dry it. You can’t crop your hair any shorter than it already is without going bald.

On a whim, you open the Etsy app and message BOUJEEMAN96.

[brightly, coy] I’ve got a surprise for you for our next date

BOUJEEMAN96 replies with [intrigued, flirty] oh? *wink*

You throw in a laughing emoji that matches the expression on your face and leave it at that. But when you lower your phone and stare into the mirror, tears streak and mix with the pink dye smeared on your face, and you know you have little time to fix the mess you made.

At the restaurant, a fancy Sichuan place—but not quite as glorious as you’d thought the choice was because they are having a promotional discount of 85% off certain dishes—10 p.m. sharp, you find yourself settled across from BOUJEEMAN96, who you refer to now as BM96 for short. You’ve made your hair as presentable as you could, and you hold your breath as you wait for your date to comment on the look he’d suggested.

You’re cute, he says after a moment, but he’s not looking at you, he’s looking at the waiter who just took your orders.

Still, you hold the smile on your face.

The pink suits, doesn’t it? you prod.

Mhmm, he mumbles.

When the food arrives, you look down, rage boils: there is hair. And you’re about to call the waiter back when you realize that the hair on top of the mapo tofu is your own—pink mixed with the brown-black. You fish it out before BM96 could notice, but in your scramble to do so, more pink flakes onto the dish.

BM96 looks first at the dish, then you, then unsubtly pushes back his food. The smile on your face won’t leave, but you feel it wobble.

He says nothing for the rest of the meal, but as though he could read your thoughts when he dropped you off at the front of the convenience store, he says: Don’t worry about it, okay, cutie?

And all is well.

At home, in the washroom once more, the bald patches glisten. Some speckled, all glaring and spiteful. The edges of your pixie-cut-almost-buzz-cut are brittle, dry, split, and dandruff litters the top of your head.

The next date is next week, 11 p.m., not at the convenience store, but at your place.

INTERLUDE

You didn’t want to have to make this pun either, but truly, you’ve gotten yourself into quite the hairy situation.

It’s been six months since BM96 moved into your apartment, and you’re staring into the bathroom mirror of the convenience store before collapsing onto the dirty floor slick with soapy water, toilet paper, and piss, and in both hands clumps of your hair that you’d been trying to grow out but hacked off too close to the scalp with a discount razor you haggled the store owner for because it had a chip—one you made yourself—in one of the blades.

You hoped he wouldn’t find you, but of course he did—as always, the prince on white horse chasing after the fleeing damsel, but truly, you didn’t want him to come after you, no, because you know you’d only fall back into his arms, find comfort in his even temper, his gentle, grooming words that slice like knives yet caress like feathers, because of course he wanted only what was best for you, and of course he knew you better than yourself—or so he whispered, an insistent echoed lulling in your ear, day after day after night after night after happily ever after happily ever after happily—

HAIRCUT IV: The Wig

You’re going to a drive-through movie for your one-year anniversary. 12 a.m. A rerun of The Little Mermaid.

You scratch at your head, the wig itching your shaved scalp. BM96 tugs, gently, at the waist-length braid down your back, twirls it in his fingers, then brings it to his lips for a kiss.

Beautiful, he says, as the movie begins, but there is something he holds back from saying.

At home, you pull off the wig and check your hair growth, pull the topper off the regeneration serum and massage it into your head in handfuls even though the instructions say to only use several drops at most, twice a week. The bald spots persist, irritated by the product, but you are desperate, and everything else has failed, and getting professional treatment isn’t an option.

The sound of the door closing has you scrambling to secure your wig back on when you realize you’ve passed out in the bathroom, again.

BM96 is gone, and so is the sparse number of items he’d brought with him when he moved in.

On the kitchen counter is a single jade ring, the one that has been sitting in your cart from BM96’s store since the first date.

A ping.

You pull out your phone.

A notification from Etsy.

“I don’t think it’s going to work out. But I’d love to give you the jade ring, for free, for the time we spent together. I did enjoy your company, really.”

In your cart, the listing for the jade ring expired.

You click on his seller profile. There is a new listing up, a ring, similar but not quite, with an even steeper discount. And it makes you feel like a discounted lover who was no longer worth the discount. Several people already have the new ring in their carts, and you wonder how many of those people will end up welcoming BOUJEEMAN96 into their home, heart, mind.

But you add the ring to your cart again, and wait for a message, a proposal that never comes.

---

Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 948 for November 8th, 2024.

A Relationship in Four Haircuts, by Ai Jiang

Narrated by Pine Gonzalez; hosted by Kat Day audio by Chelsea Davis

---

Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Kat, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod], your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have A Relationship in Four Haircuts, by Ai Jiang. This story first appeared in the 2024 anthology Welcome to Your Body: Lessons in Evisceration.

Author bio [from anthology]:
Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun, and I AM AI. Find her at www.aijiang.ca

Narrator bio:
Pine Gonzalez is a Puerto Rican/Chinese American writer and voice actor from the Chicagoland area. They are the creator of the podcasts Tales from the Fringes of Reality and Forged Bonds, both of which also feature their voice. When not writing or working at a bookstore they can be found listening to as many audio dramas as they are able to and playing with their dog Athena.

And now we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s true.

---

ENDCAP

Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of A Relationship in Four Haircuts by Ai Jiang? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

I was chatting to someone about the nature of stories recently and one of the things that came up was how fluid horror can be. Sometimes it’s literally about fluids, but that’s not what I mean – more that when you think about some kinds of genre fiction, the beats are very well established. For example, a romance includes a meeting, a getting-to-know-you phase, a break-up and a reconciliation. If it doesn’t have those things, a story might be something else with romantic elements, but it’s not a romance, not really. Similarly, you can’t have a detective story without a crime, some dead-ends, an eventual solution and, well, a detective. And so on.

But horror has few such rules. You don’t have to have a monster. You don’t have to have a haunted house. You don’t have to have violence, or blood. It doesn’t even need to have a speculative element: sometimes the horror of, for example, warfare, is more than enough.

Horror can be anything that’s… well… disturbing. I’ve said before that at PseudoPod we talk about creeping dread. Knowing that something isn’t quite right. That feeling of unease when you know – if not consciously then certainly somewhere deep in your gut – that you’ve turned away from the sunlit uplands and we’re now walking through the black, leaf-less tress of the dark woods. And, oh dear, you’ve lost sight of the way out.

Which brings me back to this story.

There’s a moment early on in this piece that really hit me: “This feels familiar, even though it isn’t.”

That. That’s it. That sense, that someone’s behaviour is slightly wrong. Slightly too… what? At-ease? Comfortable? Or, yes, familiar? It is unsettling. We expect everyone to be a little anxious during a first meeting, and when they’re not, it feels wrong. The dynamic feels off, as though they’ve taken a little more power than they ought. Now, it might, of course, just be that person’s way of interacting – if they truly have good intentions, it will shake out. But here…

… here, no.

Boojeeman96 immediately moves onto negging when our protagonist shows him her ‘before’ picture and he comments that he likes women with long hair.

I found myself wanting to yell ‘RUN’ at this point, but you can’t do that with a story, can you. That’s the point.

Another thing I’ve said before and I’m going to say it again: horror stories evolved as warnings and they remain warnings to this day. The only thing that changes is what we’re being warned about.

Boojeeman96 is being nice by the end of the first date. Considerate, in fact. Mostly. It’s a crumb of comfort but it is comfort. So that’s something, isn’t it?

Run.

Catsonly has forgotten about her own needs. Maybe she never thought about them in the first place. And that’s the horror here. She worries, constantly, about what other people think and want, and she has forgotten that she needs to be looked after too. If not by anyone else then at least by herself. She could remove her facial hair gently, or even just leave it all alone – why not? – but no, she uses threading, bruising and breaking her skin. She could be careful with the bleach, but no, she burns herself.

She doesn’t even especially like this person but she wants him to like her, and so, within six months he’s moved into her apartment. With his, “his even temper, his gentle, grooming words that slice like knives yet caress like feathers.”

Grooming words. She knows. But she’s lost sight of the way out.

He doesn’t hurt her, not physically. Only emotionally. Does that count? It’s certainly harder to explain. A ‘perfect’ victim, bloody and bruised, is much easier to understand, isn’t it. This man only played with her mind, amused himself for a while, and then tossed her aside like a toy he’d become bored with. And sure, it’s shitty behaviour, but we’re not going to eviscerate him for it, are we, I mean, she spoke to him, she was affectionate towards him, she liked him.

She consented.

You know, I don’t even know.

I don’t know.

I am tired, though.

I’m tired, and sad and a little bit broken, because I wanted to believe that most humans are decent and that most people don’t enjoy hurting other people – whether physically or emotionally or both – and not… that it is so commonplace as to happen more often than not.

But. Here we are.

All right, I may be a purveyor of horror but I am not a monster. Let’s find a spark of light in the darkness. There always is one, even if it’s just a flash of light behind your own eyelids. There are good people out there, and we can all be reminded to be better. To care about others. There are people out there who’ve made bad decisions and choices who are trying to do the right thing now, and look, it’s never too late. I do believe that.

And there are people out there who aren’t even trying to make the world a better place but they do, they do every day, just because they care enough to reach out. Remember those people. Cherish them. Tell them how much you appreciate them.

Thank you.

And remember to look after yourself. Your needs matter. Eat the food, watch the television show, make art, be gentle with yourself. You can’t control other people – and they will let you down sometimes because people are messy and complicated and, well, people – but you can choose your own actions. So be nice to yourself. Nurture the flicker of light behind your own eyelids.

Love, and peace.

---

Now, onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

Those of you that already support us: thank you! We literally couldn’t do it without you! Anyone who’s thinking, ‘oh yes, I must go and do that,’ there’s something to be aware of: Apple have changed the way charging works through App Store apps. Long story short: sign up through a browser – including one on actually ON your phone – and it’ll be cheaper than if you go through the official Patreon app. This doesn’t affect existing subscribers – don’t worry! – it’s just for new members.

And, if you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying various logo-ed goodies from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our latest social media posts.

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

Next week we have Less Exalted Tastes by the wonderful Gemma Amor.

And finally, PseudoPod, and The Goo Goo Dolls (the song is Iris, go listen) know….

And I don’t want the world to see me; ‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand

When everything’s made to be broken; I just want you to know who I am

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.