When I watched my mother brush her hair, it made a scraping electric sound: vibrating plastic teeth sinking repeatedly into a fuzzy animal. I loved watching my mother brush her hair. I’d make sure to always stand behind her, so I couldn’t see her face. I always felt safer when I couldn’t see faces. Faces held eyes, and eyes were too much. Mix the eyes in with mouths, noses, and everything else that formed a living portrait, and it was too much for my nerves to process. But the backs of heads: I was safe. That is, until the day my mother told me that she had eyes in the back of her head. My staring became a different pastime, fraught with anxiety. Why couldn’t I see the eyes that were seeing me? How deep were they hidden in my mother’s forest of hair? Years later, when my mother got sick and had to shave her head, I no longer believed in the eyes, but still I had to check … my mother’s head was my first temple.