The wigmaker stopped weaving and placed the wig on the green Formica counter top. The silver needle remained in the landscape of hair and netting, spearing it like a shovel in earth. “If you can’t afford it,” he said to Peter, “Furnish me with enough human hair to make three wigs, and I’ll give you one wig gratis, free as air.” He flashed his gray teeth.

Peter stood in the tiny shop amidst the bodiless heads of wig mannequins, picturing the ways in which he might obtain the bounty. A train shunted into the station beneath and the wigs quivered. The scent of singed hair clawed at the shop’s walls.

The wigmaker watched Peter through the steam that curled from his chipped teacup. “It’s the best I can do for people in your unfortunate situation,” he went on. “You will essentially be trading with the currency of hair. Make sure it’s virgin hair, it’s useless otherwise.” He adjusted a black Egyptian pageboy that crowned a battered Styrofoam head. Blind eyes had been drawn into the white sockets with black ink. The face was devoid of lashes and brows, the tip of the nose had crumbled away. The wigmaker adjusted the price tag: £3,000.

“How will I know if she’s a virgin?” Peter finally asked.

The wigmaker snickered and explained that this was not a question of carnal purity. “The hair must be natural. No chemical treatments, no dyeing.” He stroked the pageboy wig.

How did a man obtain so much human hair? The wigmaker did possess a certain menacing undertone, like a French horn boiling slowly at the edge of a symphony. As Peter descended into the station, his thoughts forked around images of his own stepfather, Guillaume. When Peter was a lithe and unknowing boy, Guillaume would usher him to the dim limits of the Tesco car park. He would arm Peter with a torch, and lift him up to the mouth of the clothing donation bin. “Look for suits,” Guillaume’s voice would crackle, and the chute would yawn with rust.

The first time, Peter was terrified that the torch’s batteries would die, that Guillaume would fail to fish him out. It was the smell of so many dejected things that Peter could never forget; it was the heft of the bags as he hoisted them to the mouth of the bin, let them trickle like spittle into his stepfather’s arms. Guillaume would slit the bags open and swear in a language that Peter could not yet decipher. He would shove the loose contents back in and the chute would clang shut—a neatly sealed tomb.

Peter was now a butcher by trade, but his calloused hands could never forget how a rare jackpot of tweed had felt. At such times, Peter had peeked breathlessly across the flaking chute. He had angled his torchlight upon the slender dandy as he sized a pair of tartan slacks against his sweeping legs. Guillaume’s sneer would slacken, and he’d lift Peter down from the tomb of rags. He would hold the boy and stroke his hair and offer to reward him with sweets, treats, toffee, trinkets, by uttering the magic words: “Choose anything you want.”

At the underground platform, the crowd formed a mound of clothes as the 4:59 express stuttered to a halt. Peter gripped the warm butcher’s shears inside his capacious pocket and his eyes boggled across the ponytails hustling seductively toward the train. As quick as a pickpocket he snatched at a firm, flaxen braid. The shears whispered through the neat strands of hair.

The braid wilted, as flaccid as a severed gooseneck. The flock of black coats, of sweat and stale perfume, flapped and shuffled into the carriage. The butchered stub waggled on the back of the oblivious woman’s head. Soon she would realize her hair was missing, but by then she would be deep inside the veins of the underground, pulsing steadily away from Peter’s thrumming heart.

Each time he stole a woman’s hair that evening, Peter would change platforms and board a train to a different station. After a total of five victims, he was rich with the currency of hair. He leaned against a pillar outside London Bridge Station and lit a cigarette. He caressed the secret mass inside his pocket.

The rich hair of the rush-hour crowd was thinning noticeably, and as Peter’s eyes surveyed a straggling herd of businessmen, he conceded that the day’s harvest was complete. He made his way back underground, but just as he stepped into a carriage, he glimpsed the tall smear of a human form. A lady was ascending the white stairs of the platform, her black hair swinging like the needle of a metronome. Peter could see just the gleaming edge of one cheek, but it was clear to him that she was superior: Goddess was the unfamiliar term that rippled into his mind. Her marble hand hovered above the banister as she rose, and she appeared not to step but to float out of the underground. She approached the limits of Peter’s line of sight and the train doors rolled shut.

Peter stopped at his sister’s flat on the way home. She did not answer, so he let himself in. The dim room was thick with an impasto of cigarette smoke, streaked with a sickly brushstroke of medicine. The glow of the TV fell over Odette like a hospital sheet, and her hairless skull was mummified with a white scarf. Her dressing gown looked like dirty feathers, gray with the unanimous soot of the dying.

Odette handed Peter a torn envelope: her members’ tickets to an Egypt exhibit.

“I thought we were going to this together?” Peter said.

Odette shook her head without shifting her focus and Peter’s eyes combed the scars on her neck. He looked away, slipped the tickets into his wallet, and sat on the sofa. As he settled into the nest of worn velvet, the ponytails in his pocket flexed against his waist. They were gestating, soon to emerge as a brilliant wig.

“In less than a month I’ll have something amazing for you,” said Peter.

Odette watched blankly as a woman rubbed moisturizer into her neck. An animation demonstrated the elixir’s ability to erase the divots that time had carved into her skin. Odette raised her electrolarynx to her throat.“I’ll be dead in a month, if I’m lucky,” she buzzed, her lashless eyes fixed on the screen.

* * *

Odette had not always been so irreverent. Before they had gone to live with Guillaume, she and Peter would warble into the soot of Whitechapel from the stage of their leaky balcony, and they would grip and shake the ancient rails like prison bars. They had sung as only children or birds will: unaffected, unmitigated, unaware of any economy between audience and artist. Odette’s voice had bent with a sincerity beyond its years, and the minarets of East London pierced the orange crust of dusk like fork tines. Peter could still taste it: the sinews of the city, the succulent blood of life’s fleshy substance.

Who could have predicted the jagged razor of noise Odette was destined to emit? The swan song that had nested in the reeds of her voice was slit by a surgeon—Guillaume had called him an “imbécile incompétent,” though that was not entirely fair. This knight had donned his scrubs of white, he had wielded his shining surgical lancet, and had gallantly slain the tumors that emerged like trolls on the slick banks of Odette’s throat. But it was all for naught: the cancer returned in hordes.

* * *

The following evening, Peter presented the wigmaker with a package wrapped in butcher’s paper. In an effort to contain the hair, he had bandaged each ponytail with white gauze from his medicine cabinet. When the wigmaker unfolded the offering, he whistled. “These are splendid specimens.” He squinted through a monocle and examined the ends for splitting; he calculated the girth of each fibrous, gauze-girdled waist. Finally he huffed and frowned. “There’s only enough for two sparse wigs. Perhaps you could encourage a few more of your generous friends to donate?” The wigmaker’s incisors glistened as he spat the final consonant.

Peter inhaled the scent of black tea, but he could almost feel the dizzying burn of the schnapps and cigars which had so often poisoned the breath of Guillaume. His eyes whipped across the ponytails: blond locks, brunette tresses, slumped on the counter like rejected clothing. At last his eyes nestled into the sleek sheen of the black pageboy wig.

“She’s a beauty, n’est pas?” said the wigmaker. “But she’s already spoken for. A charming trannie—bald as a pea—put a deposit down this morning.” The wigmaker leaned back, one hand on his tartan hip, the other stroking his triangular beard.

The ponytails waited quietly on the counter between Peter and the wigmaker.

“Splendid specimens,” the wigmaker repeated under his breath. He reached his long fingers toward a length of limp fuzz. He lifted it to his nostrils and when he finally exhaled, he whimpered—barely audibly—like an injured wolf. Peter gawked, but vaguely understood that his visceral objection was self-reflexive, that the serviceable villain embodied some sinister remnant of a desire that was Peter’s own.

A train was approaching in the station beneath. The shop rattled. Peter snatched up the hair and concealed it in the paper. He forced his face into the approximate shape of a smile. “I’ll be back by the end of the week with more hair. Two more ponytails: that should be enough, n’est pas?”

The monocle fell from the wigmaker’s eye and bounced against the counter. “If you can manage it, three would be better,” he said, clasping at the monocle, but Peter had slipped through the door and the shop-bell was laughing behind him.

* * *

Peter stopped at Odette’s again on his way home. She came to the door herself, her head devoid of coverings, and except for a hopeful patch of downy fluff, she was completely bald.

They sat at her counter and ate toast and sardines. The scars on Odette’s neck rippled and flexed as she struggled to swallow. She smoked, he refrained.

“So will you come to my birthday this year?” Peter asked. Odette stubbed out her cigarette in the empty sardine tin, the sharp lid curled like a silver tress between them.

“I don’t want your butcher mates seeing me, not when I look like this,” she buzzed.

“You’ll look great. Promise you.” Peter crossed his heart and let his eyes tread the soft white marsh of Odette’s scalp. She placed her electrolarynx on the counter. It looked like a dead torch.

“What if it’s just us and mum then? And Guillaume?” Peter said.

Odette thrummed her yellowed fingertips on the counter. This had always been her habit, a little prelude to a punch line or profound comment, a drum roll announcing some witty observation.

“We’ll see,” was all she said. She didn’t even bother to lift her electrolarynx to her throat but Peter saw the words written in her final breath of smoke. If I can restore her minutely, he promised himself as he walked across the cobblestones of London—past the thugs on the corner who loitered like tumors—I’ll do anything it takes.

After he showered away the soot of the city and the blood of his trade, Peter contemplated the dormant ponytails. The wigmaker had looked at these same bandaged strips of hair, touched them so gently as if the women who’d possessed them were still attached.

* * *

If Guillaume was the master who had taught Peter the art of stealth, then it was Odette who had been his mistress in the school of theft. When Peter was twelve and Odette fifteen, they would ride their bikes to the corner shop. “Leave your helmet on so you’ll look a harmless spastic,” Odette advised, and she would distract the young employee who arranged tinned goods into pyramids. While he knelt before a growing shrine of cat food, she would flick her black hair and make wry comments about the dowdy women who scrutinized the merchandise. While the employee was mesmerized, Peter would reach into the shelves and slide chocolate bars into the sleeves of his parka. They named this method “sleeving,” and Odette warned Peter with a sisterly precision, “If things get tight, stuff the chocolate down your underpants, cops can’t search your dick.” They would sell the chocolate to other kids in their street, and with the income they derived they would buy the coveted cigarettes that were kept behind the counter.

* * *

Peter hosed the last rivulets of blood into the abattoir’s drain. After the other butchers had left, he stood among the hanging carcasses and inspected his shears. He scraped the sinews from the pivot and sharpened each blade with breathless caution. He oiled the rivet, angled the shears in the pallid flicker of the fluorescent tube light, and with tender satisfaction noted the clean strip of silver that ran along the edge of each scissor. He stacked some scattered Styrofoam meat trays then threw on his lumberjack coat. He sheathed the immaculate shears inside the pocket: the lining was torn and his hand reached deep inside the jacket’s breast.

As he had done a few evenings prior, Peter wove among the tangle of commuters in the underground. People were reductions—they were pure hair—and the remainders of their beings were mere mannequins or meat trays. A red rivulet of a braid dripped down the back of a transparent plastic raincoat. Its owner was short enough so that the theft would be obscured by the crowd, and, best of all, she gripped the white cane of the vision impaired. Peter pressed his body behind her rump. The crowd filed toward the carriage, the doors hissed open, Peter scythed the red braid. He sleeved it greedily, the warm hair brushing against the inside of his wrist.

But the woman halted in front of the carriage doors, the white eyeball of her cane poised at the corrugated edge of the gap. She turned, her free hand groped the buttons on Peter’s chest, sensing the brail of his breath. She stretched upward to read his face.

Peter spun around, his trainers squeaking against the tiles. He expertly transferred the braid into his underpants, but in the scramble he dropped his shears. They skated across the floor toward the train, and Peter heard the metal he knew so well skidding over the corrugations, then clattering into the gap. The blind woman’s palsied fingers rose up to touch the stump of hair. A ubiquitous commuter slanted toward her, cupping his hands.

That was all Peter saw. He dashed to the escalators, brushed up against a gaggle of nuns, rushed toward the Jubilee Line platform. A train was pulling in. He boarded just as the doors were closing.

Peter powered through the carriages in a further effort to evade any arbiters of justice. He dodged the silent commuters and their newsprint scent, did not stumble as the train wound around the tunnel. But the thick braid—still warm from the blind woman’s body—was rubbing against his crotch as he moved. Against his will, Peter was becoming aroused.

He obscured himself in the semi-private space between two carriages and steadied his frame by grasping the metal bars. Beneath him, through the cracks of the articulations, he saw the blackened railway tracks flashing, matte with the film of smoke that powdered the city’s ribcage. He looked through the scratched glass at the working girls in their expensive coats, the supple leather of their winter gloves strained as they gripped the silver rails. But no matter how beautiful they were, how birdlike their necks, how slender their wrists and tender their eyes, all he could see them for was their hair.

The train vibrated as Peter focused on two uniformed schoolgirls who relaxed into the bed of coarse tartan upholstery. The ribbons of their slack, unaffected ponytails had come undone, and hung limply from the elastic of their hair-bands. This was a beautiful sight, but it was soon obstructed when a new shape leaned on the window: hair as black as onyx, as long and as straight as a staff, pressing up against the glass. The corner of one angular cheek gleamed like a razor: it was the Goddess from London Bridge.

The braid in Peter’s underpants coiled around him like a warm snake. Peter leaned against the bar. It shivered as the engineer applied the brake. The tracks flashed in the cracks beneath his feet. The lines formed a sooty lexicon, some hieroglyph of truth known only to the tunnel itself. The virgin strands of the Goddess’ hair fluttered against the window as the train entered Westminster Station.

Peter got off. He marched straight to the men’s toilets and regretted that he’d blown his chance to get closer to the Goddess, to at least see her face. He pulled out the sleeping snake of hair from his underwear, wrapped it in toilet paper, and hid it in the lining of his pocket. He pushed through the turnstile with the hard bone of his hip, and plummeted into the brisk air of dusk.

Peter slouched against the gray bricks of Westminster Station. “Rock bottom,” he whispered guiltily, then gripped a cigarette between his lips. As he drew in this forbidden pleasure, he reached through the hole in his pocket and grasped the wrapped braid. It was Friday, everything was open late, and if he hoofed it he could reach the wigmaker before he knocked off for the night. But why bother? It still wasn’t enough hair.

“Got a light?” came a voice from beside Peter. It had a sharp hook: a Northern burr.

Peter looked through the veil of smoke to see that a woman had appeared, maybe twenty-five years in age, her face as long and as sharp as a hatchet. A sliver of a kilt and its pin were visible under her long coat, and a bulging wool hat wrapped her head. Peter pulled the matches out of his pocket.

“Maybe I could grab a fag off you as well?” she went on.

The blades of her cheeks curled into a wry smile. She was pretty, in an obnoxious way, but not beautiful. Peter took no interest in her as he reached again into his pocket. He offered the open cigarette box and the woman removed one glove. Then something marvelous followed: she removed her hat.

It was she. The Goddess’ tresses fell. Her marble hand withdrew a cigarette from the silver paper of the box’s heart and she gently placed it between the narrow scissors of her lips. At that moment Peter desperately wanted to watch the trinkets of her face flicker and jingle as he held a hissing flame so dangerously close to all that lovely, combustible hair, but with great control he slid the matchbox back inside his coat, and instead offered the safe, confined heat of his own burning cigarette. The woman leaned in and sucked as the two cigarettes touched.

“You know,” she said, inhaling, “You must be careful riding in between carriages like that.”

Her hair glittered in the taillights of the buses and cars. After a brittle pause, Peter blurted, “Your hair.” He did not know what the woman had seen, or what to say next: Where did you get your hair? Can I have your hair? “Your hair is a splendid specimen,” Peter managed at last.

The woman laughed. “Specimen?”

“Is it real?”

Two white scraps of smoke curled from the blade of her nose. “Yes, my hair is real.” She laughed again.

“Do you perm it?”

“Never.”

“Dye?”

“No. What are you, a hairdresser?”

“Not really. I just know beautiful hair when I see it.” Peter said.

“I used to volunteer as a hair model. Free haircuts. I don’t do it anymore. I got sick of being butchered.”

Despite the burr, her voice had a familiar quality. The cigarettes were burning away quickly and Peter knew he had about three drags left to charm her. The clock tower struck, and six ghostly chimes stretched across the icy Thames. A bus hummed past wearing a gaudy billboard: Egypt—Tombs Through Time Exhibit. It stopped to let passengers on, and the eye of Horus winked at Peter from the side of the bus while commuters fumbled for their fares.

“Egypt,” he thrust his cigarette toward the bus. “Have you seen that exhibition? We’re members. I’ve got tickets. It’s open late tonight,” Peter blathered.

The woman shook her head.

“Come there with me,” he said.

She took the final drag then dropped her cigarette. She scraped her boot over the smoldering butt, streaking a line of black ash onto the city’s concrete skin.

“We’ll see,” she said, her mouth annunciating the words with smoke, shaping them like a lathe carves away excess wood.

“We’ll see?” repeated Peter. He looked at her silver eyes, her onyx hair, the unscarred marble of her throat. He cast his gaze out into the bald void of the ancient river. The bus rolled from the curb. The eye of Horus benevolently observed the city’s denizens from its side. It paused in the middle of Westminster Bridge, and then reached the other side of the river. It vanished from sight.

“All right,” the woman resolved, and the words bent out of her, this time painted with fog, not smoke. She picked up the dead cigarette butt and threw it in a metal bin. She pulled on her hat. “All right, weirdo from Westminster Station,” she smiled petulantly. “I’ll go there with you.”

* * *

Moira was her name. As they drifted through the exhibition, Peter talked about Odette. Moira listened quietly as her eyes brushed the artifacts that incubated inside the cabinets.

“Odette is only twenty-five,” he told her, “You’re not supposed to have cancer that young, but she does. She’d love this exhibition. When we were little, we used to play a game called ‘Egyptian Burial.’ We would make coffins out of boxes and mummify our teddies. One year, for my seventh birthday, Odette made a huge sarcophagus. She covered it with foil and paint, then I mummified her by wrapping her in toilet paper. Mum and Guillaume lifted her and laid her down in the sarcophagus. She wriggled and laughed like crazy. ‘Stop stirring, Pharaoh,’ I kept saying, ‘You’re supposed to be dead!’ Guillaume had given me a gold cape, and I wore that and a pair of black Speedos.” Moira laughed. “Odette had painted my face and chest like a Sphinx, two big circles on my chest to suggest boobs—ridiculous. When she was in the coffin I had to say a prayer for her, offering her to the gods. She had written the prayer herself, this bizarre homily about the evanescence of the flesh, the immortality of the soul, far beyond her years. I think mum and Guillaume might still have it somewhere.”

Finally they came to a cabinet that contained a brown, greasy mop dumped on a crumbling skull. “That’s a wig?” said Peter. “I never realized they looked like that.” An Egyptian wig should be sleeker, cleaner, immortalizing; but this shaggy mass hung from the chalky bust—supposedly Cleopatra’s—like dags from a sheep’s hind.

“Composed of plant fiber, wool of sheep, and human hair,” Moira said.

He didn’t know if she had read the information or if she just knew it. Odette would have just known it. Peter absorbed her: Moira, benevolently contemplating the debris of an ancient world, towering above the model pyramids. She was so lovely, but Peter needed to focus. He could take her home, cut her hair off while she slept; he had to do something, but she seemed so impervious. Maybe he could just ask.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” Moira said evenly, as if she knew exactly why, and just like that, the precision and pressure of the burr in her voice slit Peter open like a yearling’s velvet throat.

“Moira.” His knees gave way. “I need your hair. For Odette.” He gestured at the disappointing wig.

Moira looked down at the pathetic young man. He reached into the lining of his chest and produced the mummified braid. He clawed at the toilet paper and it fell away like dandruff. Moira regarded the limp sacrifice.

“I stole it,” Peter confessed. “And five others. Now I just need one more.”

Moira took the snake of hair, and placed it in the mouth of her purse. She extended her arm and helped the boy to his feet.

They stood a long time, looking into an empty sarcophagus. “All right,” said Moira. “Let’s go. I have a hair appointment.”

On their way to the station, they stopped at a corner shop. Moira talked to the man arranging a display while Peter sifted through the aisles for some barber’s scissors. He sleeved the nicest pair, but as he stood in line to buy cigarettes, he let them trickle back out of his coat and into his palm. He placed them on the counter top.

“Just the scissors?” asked the clerk. Peter regarded the shelves paved with the sleek rectangles of cigarette boxes.

“Just the scissors,” Peter confirmed.

At his flat, Peter unwrapped the butcher’s paper and revealed the stolen ponytails to Moira. He was certain she’d back out, but she said that none of the facts changed her mind. She removed the red braid from her purse and added it to the harvest. “Just don’t completely butcher me,” was her only instruction as she sat before the mirror. Peter sliced skillfully: it was just like quartering a lamb. He did not take all of Moira’s hair though; it was so long that he cut it just above her shoulders and still obtained a sizable swatch.

“You look like Cleopatra,” said Peter as he tied a string of gauze around the thick wad. “Liz Taylor version, that is. Not that sheep’s arse thing we saw tonight.”

Moira laughed. In the reflection Peter could see right into her throat.

* * *

The next morning Moira was gone when Peter woke, but the shape of her head was still pressed into the pillow. Three loose quilt feathers rested on the sheets.

Peter wrapped the seven ponytails in the tattered butcher’s paper and caught the train to the wig shop. When he arrived, the wigmaker was melting something into the hair on the underside of a wig net. The shop reeked worse than a slaughterhouse.

The wigmaker looked up from his work and removed his magnifying goggles.

“Voilà!” said Peter, and he tore the butcher’s paper in two. The wigmaker immediately reached into the mound of ponytails for Moira’s severed locks.

“Exquisite,” he uttered.

“A splendid specimen, n’est pas?” said Peter.

The wigmaker nodded gracefully. “I can have your wig ready within three weeks. Pick a style,” he waved his hand across the room, “Choose anything you want.”

* * *

Three weeks, it turned out, was too long. At the funeral parlor, Moira waited beside a plump armchair. She looked so angular beside all that softness, as though if she sat down the sharp edges of her bones might slice the velvet, and the feathers inside the cushions would be free to finally flutter away. Peter handed the wig to the funeral director, who looked at it, then at Moira, then back at the wig. Peter could tell what he was thinking: that the wig and Moira’s hair were exactly the same.

“It’s lovely,” the funeral director said. He splayed his fingers inside the wig and held it up. “Everything is going to be beautiful. Odette would be so grateful for what you have done.”

It was all tripe, the things a man would say about a corpse that waited on a slab like a side of lamb in a meat-locker. What difference could a wig make? Nobody would see Odette again, unless she was exhumed in thousands of years, after civilization had collapsed and the graves of Britannia had become superstitious tombs of anthropological import. Historians would dig through the underground of London and decode the gestures of the past, exhume and evaluate corpses and their sentimental treasures like so much stolen hair.

* * *

Odette’s funeral fell on Peter’s birthday. At the church, he approached the woody sarcophagus. The wig crowned Odette’s pale face perfectly. Her closed eyes were lined with some kind of ink, and synthetic lashes and eyebrows had been added to the desolate Styrofoam of her skin. Peter rested his hands on the edge of the coffin: he had restored her minutely. But the mortician had left Odette’s throat bare, it had been her request all along, and the bald truth of her disease was written there for all to read. The pink lines carved not the shapes of arcane hieroglyphs, but plain English that any vulgar butcher or common thief could decipher. Peter touched her neck, each line was like brail. The black hair of the wig stirred like life still lived in each strand.

Peter sat between Guillaume and Moira. At the finale of the service, he stood at the lectern clutching the very prayer Odette had written all those years before: when Peter had asked about it, Guillaume had fished it out readily from a metal jewelry box. Peter traipsed gracelessly through the spelling mistakes, begging like a thief for the gods to treasure his sister’s soul.

“Forgive her, O Horus. Restore her. Make her soul immune!” Peter read, and he smiled because Odette had drawn a juvenile neo-Egyptian Sphinx, complete with gravity-defying breasts.

At the cemetery, Peter knelt into the scent of fresh earth. He scattered the first fistful of dirt onto the arrangement of irises and white roses atop the coffin’s lid. He pictured the cardboard sarcophagus from his birthday, how Odette had leapt out after Peter had read the prayer. Their mother and Guillaume had laughed as the toilet paper split and fell from Odette’s body like feathers. Happy birthday! She had sung—Guillaume had produced a lopsided cake and they had all sung to the scrawny Sphinx in his gold cape and baggy Speedos. Now, Guillaume curled his arm around his wife and pulled her toward the threadbare tweed of his heart. They are not immune, Peter thought as he looked across the gap at their pathetic forms. They were never immune.

Moira’s black hair swung like a hatchet. She speared her hand into the dirt that thrummed against the lid as it fell into the ground. Peter swept the earth into his palm.

---

Elizabeth Davies was born in Melbourne, Australia and moved to Houston in 2006. She is the author of “Stan Alone,” a short story which was awarded the Boldface Robertson Prize in 2011. Her story “The Wigmaker and the Thief” received the 2013 Gulf Coast Undergraduate Creative Writing Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in Glass Mountain and Northwest Review. Davies is an undergraduate creative writing student at the University of Houston.