Free The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

for a shaving cut, in case he bled into his collar. But when he started to move off he felt his hair pulled again. Twisting, he found himself face-to-face with the other Chinese, their queues knotted tight together.
    â€œA real pair of Siam twins!” someone ballyhooed.
    Ling tried to turn away again, but the other man set off in the opposite direction and almost pulled Ling off his feet. The crowd howled.
    â€œThis way,” Ling hissed.
    â€œNo, this!”
    And now when they set off, they clashed, the brim of the man’s hat catching Ling above the eye.
    â€œLet me—” Ling began, picking at the knot before it got any tighter, but the man slapped his hands away.
    â€œWho asked you to interfere? You’re asking to be kicked!”
    â€œSon of a dog!” Ling snapped back.
    The other man raised his leg—as if to stamp, Ling thought—and drew a gleaming cleaver from his boot top. Ling closed his eyes, braced himself for the blow.
    He felt himself struck, a momentary searing pain, and then nothing.
    â€œScalped him, by God!” he heard someone hoot. “Bloody savages!” And when he opened his eyes he saw the other Chinese holding up a severed queue like a snake. Ling only recognized it by the royal blue ribbon at the end, given him by Miss Harriet.
    He tried to snatch it back, but the fellow jerked away, Ling’s queue still knotted to his own, trailing in the dust.
    Ling crooked his neck, felt the odd weightlessness, then shook his head more swiftly. It felt like it might fly off altogether, and he stopped, suddenly dizzied. Golden motes of dust kicked up in the melee and lit by the sun swirled around him.
    â€œQuite the queue-riosity, you might say,” some wag joked. “A rat without his tail.”
    â€œGo on with you,” another of the ghosts said, not ungently, and Ling nodded—once, as he meant to, and then two, three times, as if his head were loose on his neck. He put a hand there and felt the thick, loose brush of hair at his nape. It ran like water through his fingers. Like a mane, he thought. A breeze stirred across his shoulders, and then he was running, chasing the other Chinese, heedless of the blade flashing in the man’s hand, his own queue skittering ahead of him just out of reach. He could have caught it too—the running came effortlessly, as it seemed to him, as if he were flying, with no flailing weight of hair at his back—but what was the point? They were approaching Chinatown, but at the end of an alley he veered off from the chase, headed back to Crocker’s instead, still running, as if untethered, with nothing to hold him back.
    â€œCut your hair, I see,” Crocker said when he met him. He nodded, too shamed to speak. “Much better that way. You look like a man at last.”
    It was the next day Crocker had suggested he outfit Ling “like a civilized fellow.” He’d walked out of the store feeling a head taller, less Crocker’s servant than his muse, his prototype, even perhaps his protégé.
    He had a little mirror in his room, an old pier glass, the silver backing cracked and peeling so that looking in it he saw himself bent like a stick in water. He admired his new attire in it and decided he cut a fine figure, even if the flawed glass made him seem always to be bowing slightly to himself. (Only little Harriet, who had liked to follow him about clutching the end of his queue in her tiny fist, missed it, staining her pinafore with tears until he promised to grow it back.)
    He had shown Little Sister the clothes. He showed her his hat, he showed her his collars and cuffs, starched and ironed. And she had stroked them gently, taken them off one by one. She ran her fingers through his hair when she’d lifted off the derby, then caught it—what was left of it—together at his nape. “Short as a boy’s,” she breathed. He closed his eyes, remembering her washing and