Tome the barber had a strange gift.
Cutting a customer’s hair, she only had to watch the sand sifting down to know exactly which world they’d been born on. She never said so out loud, though. She’d just sort the grains in the dustpan by color and sweep them away without a word. Her read was never wrong, not once. Sand, it turns out, is a lot more honest than people are.
The town sat on a slab of bare rock with no atmosphere to speak of. Which meant there was no such thing as native soil, not really — not one speck of it. Every grain on the ground had arrived stuck to somebody’s boots or clothes, carried in from somewhere else. Sweep it up and you’d find a different color for every world: reds, blacks, pale off-whites. The streets, in other words, were built from fragments of distant stars.
That particular morning, the customer was a man named Kaji.
Kaji had been in town forty years. He’d drifted in as a young man and simply never left. By now he was practically a fixture — even had the local greeting down pat. There was just one thing he still wanted.
Membership in the Third Generation Society.
Only people whose families had been in town three generations back were let in — a self-important little club that decided everything from cherry-blossom seating charts to water rights. Kaji wanted in badly. He was meeting the members that very day, and he’d come in for a trim specifically to look the part of a proper old-timer.
“Tome, honestly, it feels like I’ve been here three generations myself.”
“Sure, sure.”
“Forty years, come on. I don’t even remember where I was born anymore. This is home.”
“If you say so.”
Tome kept snipping, eyes flicking down for a second.
Under the chair, a scatter of pale gold sand had piled up — a color that didn’t exist on any street in this town. Sand from somewhere far away and bone-dry. Kaji himself had apparently forgotten all about it. And yet, buried in his collar lining and the seams of his old jacket, the sand from his home world was still there, clinging on. He’d probably even forgotten the name of that world by now.
“Hey, Tome.” Kaji spoke quietly, catching her eye in the mirror. “That sand of mine — don’t mention it to anyone, okay?”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
“I mean it. Just for today, let’s say I was born here.”
Tome gave him an unreadable little smile, then tipped her chin toward the front of the shop.
Beside the entrance sat an unglazed clay jar with a sign reading NATIVE SOIL. Custom held that newcomers should take a pinch from it for good luck, a way of settling into the town. Kaji had done it too, back in his first year. A comforting little ritual — local soil, straight from home.
Just then the door rattled open.
In walked Gonda, chairman of the Third Generation Society and self-appointed dean of the town’s old guard. He dropped into the chair without ceremony and said only, “The usual.”
Tome began snipping at his white hair.
More sand fell beneath the chair — fine grains with a bluish tint. Another color absent from every street in town. The chairman’s home-world sand, in a shade nothing like Kaji’s gold.
Tome brought out the dustpan. She scooped up Kaji’s gold sand and Gonda’s blue sand together, all in one motion, and carried it, silent, to the front of the shop.
She tipped both men’s sand into the NATIVE SOIL jar with a soft rattle.
The jar’s level rose, just a little, same as it did every day.
Forty years. Fifty years. Sand from distant worlds, shaken loose one haircut at a time, piling up grain by grain until it became the town’s proudly local soil.
In the mirror, Kaji sat with his mouth hanging open.
Gonda never noticed a thing — chin lifted, wearing his best old-timer’s face, sprinkling sand from another world all over the floor.