The daughter says she feels angels with her eyes, the way her thumb tells smooth skin (angels) from dry (everything else). She can hear them, too. She says, They seek each other. They can’t see and they can’t touch so they don’t know when they’re together if they’re not singing.

The sister likes her hair to be out of her face. She uses more gel than the rest of the family combined. She is not ashamed; she has a lot of hair.

The daughter has a twin, the son, who does not like to talk. The daughter talks for them in a freeflow staccato of words, happy arpeggios. The daughter’s hair is the color of copper, of a new penny; when she tasted her hair, it tasted sharp as shampoo in her eyes. Only pennies tasted like pennies.

The sister’s hair is menacing. The mother and the father find it in the kitchen sink and on the couch and on some of the mother’s shirts that the mother has not worn since they came out of the dryer. The daughter and the brother find the hair wrapped around their toys and their toothbrushes.

The mother keeps her smile in extraordinary shape. She is soft and swift to intervene and she teaches deaf children, her hands moving like drowning whales. The deaf children swat the air when the mother talks of angels.

The daughter parts her hair down the middle and has the mother put it through a hair tie that matches her shirt. The sister paints her fingernails for her so sometimes they are slime green or fuchsia or silver. The mother is not sure about this.

They all find the hair in their food. Sometimes someone will swallow and gag, cringe, pull a hair from the throat by one end. On these occasions everyone is disgusted, even the sister. The cat does not mind the hair. The cat eats more of his own hair than he does the sister’s. The cat likes to watch MTV with the sister while she braids.

The father does not leave hair anywhere anymore. He forgets to remove his ID badge so he is ENGINEERING ASSOCIATE until the mother moves his shirt from him to a hanger. He tries to bring home candy bars for the daughter and the brother but most of the time he eats them. The drive from the home to the place where he is ENGINEERING ASSOCIATE is not long, but it is long enough to eat a couple of candy bars.

The sister does not believe in angels. The sister believes in MTV. She does not watch it often because she must be at home to watch the daughter and the brother, and it frightens the brother. The brother believes in angels. He has not met any but feels that they are there, the way he cannot see the top of his head but knows what happens to it.

Bio: Jess Dimond