She came off the mountain with her hair on fire. Said it was lightening but no-one believed her. When she healed up her head looked like a little girls birthday cake - all pink and shiny except where tufts of hair still grew.
People hoped she'd wear a wig, but she didn't. Just kept on pumping gas out at the corners, her tufted head causing much curiosity among children in back seats.
The tufts grew out long and she fluffed the hair out like she was trying to cover the baldness. Strange. The strangest thing was the guy that showed up one night and couldn't take his eyes off her.
They were in the bars and cafes for fifty miles in every direction. She braided her five asymmetric tufts and they whirled around her head when she was dancing. The guy disappeared but she was still out there at the truck stop and the Mexican places.
First there were some Anglo girls started copying her hair. Mostly junior high kids. Then it spread to the high school. Girls and boys both.
Rules were made. But hair wont grow back on orders. Someone said he'd seen the hairstyle in New York City, but that could have been something different. When the football coach and one of the English teachers showed up in tufts after summer vacation, the fad had run its course. Hair fashions resumed their normal pattern.
The woman who started it all still worked out at the corners. She bought a whole lot of wigs and changed them daily. She'd joke about getting her hair set fire to, and in the bars and taverns speculation still continued as to who or what had done it. But over the years people forgot. The only reminder was an odd photograph dug out of a box by a questioning child.