When Elizabeth's mother finally died, her hair knew before she did. It grew two meters overnight. 

Elizabeth awoke from a dream of being captured by a giant spider to find herself wrapped in the long, wiry black strands of hair suddenly shot through with silver, and she knew.

She got out of bed and went to the bathroom, avoiding the light, the mirror.

She brushed her teeth with minty toothpaste, and rinsed her mouth, her teeth aching.

She walked to the kitchen, her hair wayward, spread behind her and dragging on the floor. 

She took the shears from the utensil drawer and stood there in the kitchen, staring out at her garden, suddenly full of green herbs and blooming flowers, when only the day before it had been a dry, wintry, brown yard full of nothing but twigs and crab grasses and weeds.

Elizabeth took her hair in one hand, and began cutting it off in chunks with the shears.

For weeks and months afterwards, her neighbors would see Elizabeth working in the garden, checking her mail, walking her peculiarly large and even tempered dog, and wonder what had happened to the woman to cause her to so raggedly chop off the strands that many women in the neighborhood envied, though they would never have admitted it. They would wonder if her hair had always been streaked silvery gray, and they had failed to notice. But no one would talk to her, because her house was on the hill, and it was said to be haunted, and though parents told their children to "never mind such nonsense, of course it wasn't true," they believed in their hearts, underneath their awareness, because the house was old and the woman was strange and solitary and there were whispers of people who came from out of town to see her in the night, who left with bunches of herbs or chunks of crystal, or sticks of incense.

Elizabeth gathered the fallen hairs and put them in her fireplace and lit them. 

While the hair burned down to ash, she put a kettle on to boil.

She gathered the ashes into the ash pail and carried them to her garden, where she mixed them with the dirt of her herds and flowers and vegetables, silent. When the pail was empty, Elizabeth's hands were brown and grey with ash and dirt, and she washed them under the garden spigot, her hands going pale as the icy water leeched her warmth away. 

She plucked the leaves from the mint plants, knowing that by the afternoon they would be brown and hibernating once more.

In the kitchen, the kettle was singing.

Elizabeth walked back, slowly, crushing the mint leaves in her fingers, staining her fingers green, and releasing the sharp, resinous scent into the air.

She put the leaves into the kettle, and waited, watching as her garden began to go back to sleep.

She poured the tea into a mug and sat at her kitchen table, fingers cupped around the hot ceramic, but still icy cold.

She cried.