I had seen someone shear a sheep before,
watched a man in a blue button down and
torn straw hat pull the wool off this strange
animal like puffy cotton balls, once
at a festival in Virginia for farming
and agriculture but I knew
this would be different.
We each wore a swimsuit
and stood facing the other,
in an outdoor shower, wet feet
on the wet concrete floor as
she turned on the water and
handed me a disposable pink razor.
Following her example, I lathered soap
up and down my legs and scraped it off,
gently stroking the razor up my calf.
I watched my hairs fall off like leaves
from a tree but she grabbed my hand
as I pulled the razor toward my kneecap.
“That’s far enough,” she explained,
“only prostitutes and porn stars
shave past the knee.”
It was the same summer she taught
my baby cousin to swim. How I remember
him, this tiny thing in the water,
lost in his floaties, and me,
watching, feeling smooth-skinned and
fallow.
Paige Caine is an undergraduate senior studying biology and creative writing at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. She has just been accepted to the biology PhD program at Georgia Tech, and will begin her graduate studies next fall, studying fire ants. She has previously been published in Adanna, ANGLES, The Ekphrastic Review, The Merrimack Review, The Scarlet Leaf Review, and Star*Line.
