Ceaseless Growth
Originally Completed July 20th, 2022
Uploaded on October 9th, 2024
A song all too familiar, grating and painful, bursts into the room lit only by the early morning sun. A groan, a pale white hand grabs the buzzing thing poised on the bedside table, scrolls through messages and notifications half-sleep. After about ten more minutes she suddenly sits up. She can’t put it off anymore. She has to get ready to go to work.
Feet sleepily plodding on the floor, messily strewn with discarded snack wrappers and scribbled notes for failed poems. With a loud creak, the bathroom door opens. She gazes into the mirror: wide blue eyes, flanked above and below by spiky lines of eyelashes arrayed like little soldiers; her long brown hair, frizzy in a tangled bedhead, a mess of knots like a crown; her lips, too wide, too thin, oh God is that a mustache, she thinks to herself. Why did it have to hurt to look into the mirror? She brushes her teeth and spits into the sink, her gaze returns to the mirror to stare at herself again. Why?
She grabs the tweezers from the cabinet. The mirror stares back at her as it swings shut. She plucks the mustache hairs and pulls out the razor. Working her way down, she finds a mass of hairs on her chest, glistening an oily black. What the hell? I haven’t had to shave there in so long… A cloud of white foam gathers around it and it is sliced away. The same for her legs, till they glisten and shine in the yellow bathroom light like a river stone ground smooth by generations. She turns away from the mirror and goes to get dressed, then steps out into the hallway.
“Good morning Alice!”
Her neighbor, Samira, just across the hall. A nice young lady, right about Alice’s age actually. Alice has a bit of a thing for her.
“Uh, good morning Samira! How’s your grandma doing?”
Samira rubs the back of her head with her hand. “Not… great, to be honest. But it’ll be alright! We’ll get through this!”
Alice gives a nervous little smile. “I hope she gets better.”
“Thanks. It means a lot…”
The silence stands awkward between them, till Alice checks her phone. “Oh shit, I have to get going! Hope you have a good day!”
“You too!”
One annoyingly long commute later and Alice is at a call center nestled deep in the winding eusocial tunnels of the big city. She sits at a desk like all the others, and she is alright with it like that. After a few calls, her coworker Mandy leans over her desk, her soft arms sprawled out on the low walls.
“Hey girl! Whatcha been up to?”
“Oh, y’know, nothing much. The weekend was just time for me to uh… catch up on some cleaning and, uh, watch some–”
The women are interrupted by Alex, from the next desk over. “Hey ladies, workin’ hard or hardly workin’ eh?”
Mandy shakes her head. “Get some new material, man.”
“Hey, don’t go after my ass! It’s just a saying alright?” His eyes coast southward. “Woah! Somebody’s letting herself go!”
Alice’s eyebrows scrunch up first in confusion then offense. Glancing down, however, she notices her legs, from ankles all the way to the hem of her shorts, are covered in a prickly little forest of oily black hairs. Her eyes go wide. Hadn’t she just shaved her legs this morning? Not even a few hours ago?
Mandy pipes up “Shut the fuck up Alex. Or do you want to take it up with HR?”
“Woah, woah! I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, it was just a comment, jeeze.”
Mandy snarls at Alex. “Just sit back down” She turns to Alice. “You alright girl?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“I say keep your legs hairy if you wanna sis, that’s what I do!”
“I… I mean, yeah, you’re right, it’s just… I shaved them this morning.”
“What?”
“I shaved my legs this morning and they’ve already grown back.”
“Well, some people’s hair just grows faster, that’s just how it is.”
“I guess… It’s never grown this… fast for me before.”
“Maybe you should go to the doctor about it?”
Alice rubs the back of her head, her hands shaking. “I don’t know if I could afford a checkup right now… I’ll just… keep an eye on it and go extra hard on shaving, I guess.”
Mandy reaches over to gently pat Alice on the shoulder and squeeze reassuringly. “I gotta get back to my desk… Are you gonna be okay?”
“Yeah… Yeah, I think I’ll be fine.”
After Mandy leaves Alice frantically begins typing. Fearful tapping of keys and clicking of the mouse fills the air, a cacophony of clicks like a buzzing swarm of flies as desperate anxious thoughts fill her head. She has to figure out what’s going on, she knows she has to, she just has to. Even just getting a name to this freakish disease would ease her fitful heart. It keeps tapping like a goddamn woodpecker, her fingers the hungry tongue in search of a diagnosis. Shaking fingers struggling to type out innumerable variations on descriptions for her affliction. A lot of stuff about puberty in boys, about excessive hair growth, about those old wive’s tales about masturbation making you grow hair on the palms of your hands. Werewolves do that too, the hair in the palms of the hand. Hypertrichosis, the condition of excessive hair growth over the whole body; but it’s not nearly as fast as what’s going on right now, not at all. Sweat drips down her face, wicking to eyebrows grown longer, grown darker. She knows that nothing she finds online is quite right. None of it is. First one call comes in, and she ignores it. Then another, and another. She misses call after call in her anxious panic, glistening with sweat, her whole body starting to shake as she starts to feel the hairs growing on her legs. Maybe it’s all in her mind, the terrible feeling more a product of her overactive imagination than her actual skin.
Mandy comes back over. “Break time!” She glances up and down at her coworker. “You alright?.”
Alice frantically closes the tabs from her hours of anxious searching. “Yeah I’m fine. Was just uh, trying to figure out what’s been going on with my hair.”
Mandy’s eyebrows scrunch up as she looks over Alice’s cubicle. “Hey, wanna pop out for a bite? My treat.”
Alice looks up at Mandy, pale. “You sure?”
“We can go by that place down the street,” She gently pats Alice on the back, “the one with the really good wings.”
The two women quickly go down the elevator and out the front door. Halfway down the street, the place with the really good wings already in sight, In a murky puddle of water in a small hole on the side of the road, there is a frog. She tilts her head as she looks at it, as it looks back up at her, its eyes wide circles staring right up at her. The poor thing has a mess of legs growing out of it in every direction, legs much too thin and malformed to properly support it. One of its lanky feet stretches out, flexing its long bony toes, showing off the bleached and torn webbing between them. It seems to beg Alice, with its eyes and its empty frown of a mouth. It doesn’t look like it can even move, really. The tangled knot of legs would hinder its feeble hopping, if it even decided to try and get out of the dank little hole it had fallen into.
Mandy, noticing Alice isn’t keeping up with her, turns and marches on up to the lanky young woman looming over the mutated frog. “Alice, what the hell are you looking at? Come on— ewww, what is that thing?”
“A frog. Something’s wrong with it.”
“Well I can see that!”
Alice keeps looking at it. How many people walked by it today without giving it a second thought… she thinks to herself. Alice gently grabs the little amphibian and carries it over to a bush on the other side of the sidewalk. Placing it down gingerly in the moist shade of the bush’s leaves, she stands back up and turns to face Mandy with a nervous smile. As the women walk away, a loud croak fills the air. They turn around just in time to see the many legged frog feebly crawl out from under the bush and, in fits and starts, frantically hop back right into the middle of the road, only to be turned into a red and green paste by a passing truck. Alice immediately breaks down into tears, Mandy’s arm on her shoulder trying to reassure her as they crawl to the place with the really good wings.
The inside of the restaurant takes some getting used to, eyes adjusting to the dimness of the light as the women look over the menu. Alice doesn’t even hear what Mandy says to the waitress when she comes by. She is just staring at the laminated menu held in her hands, overwhelmed by it all. She didn’t want today to be like this.
She isn’t paying attention as she eats. Her eyes keep glancing at the clock, she can’t tell how long they’ve been there, she wants to know what’s going on, she wants to know what’s- she feels a wing in her hands, she notices it feels different. She can’t quite feel the sauce on the wings cling to her pale skin like she normally could. Looking down she realizes that her palms are coated with oily black hair. She slams her hand down on the table, making Mandy jump in surprise.
“What in the hell was that for?”
“I, uh, I have to go… I have to go, I can’t be here anymore, I have to go…”
“We’ve still got twelve minutes left on our break–”
She is sweating now, her eyes glancing back and forth frantically. “I just have to go, I can’t be here anymore, I have to go home, I have to go home.”
She pushes her plates to the side, causing them to crash to the sticky floor, leaving a pile of broken shards, chicken bones, and ranch. “Oh god I am so sorry, I’m so sorry, I uh, I have to go though, I have to go home, I can’t be here anymore. I’m sorry Mandy, can you uh, can you tell them that I’m sick? Please?”
Clutching her hands close to her belly, she dashes out of the restaurant and into the blinding light of the street outside. She frantically rushes back to her car, passing the terrible smear of the poor mutilated frog along the way, gasping for air, crying the entire way back.
When she parks her car, she stays there for just a moment, staring at her hands. She can’t see her skin through the oily mass of hair. Tears streaming down her face, she runs into her apartment building, scrambles up the stairs, past Samira’s closed door, and into the darkness of her apartment. The curtains are down everywhere but her room. She immediately slides into the bathroom, flicks the sickening fluorescent lights on, and tears off her clothes. From the neck down, she is covered in oily, sweaty hair, thinner in some parts and thicker in others. Even in places that she has never had to shave in her entire life, there is a thick forest of hair. She pulls out a razor and gets to work.
Two hours later she is rinsing the razor in the sink for what she hopes is the last time. The place is strewn with black hairs, but she feels much too tired to clean them up. Collapsing onto her bed, she drifts off to sleep.
The next morning. Alice is woken up by the echoing sounds of a very distinctive knock on her door. Once she comes to, she realizes: Oh shit! She thinks to herself, It’s Samira! She frantically gets up from her bed and puts her bathrobe on. She hears Samira calling her name from the other side of the door and goes to open it, but then she thinks to check the mirror. Gazing back at her is a face she barely recognizes. Her face is covered with hair, and the shoulder length hair atop her head now hangs down low, almost halfway down her back. The hair on her hands is back, and she can see through the neckline of her bathrobe the thick mass of oily black hair on her chest as well. She rushes back to the door and calls to Samira through it. “Hi, uh, good morning!”
“Morning? Alice, it’s one in the afternoon! I got worried when I didn’t see you leave for work today.”
Alice leans her head against the door. “I’m sorry, I… I’m not going to work today. I’m going through some… stuff.”
“Oh no, are you okay?”
“No… I mean… I guess you could say I’m sick…”
“Do you need anything?”
“No, Samira, you shouldn’t come in here, it’s uh, it’s okay.”
Silence, for just a moment. “Okay Alice. I hope you get better… if you need anything I’ll be next door.”
Alice pauses for a moment, tears falling on the carpeted floor. “Thank you, Samira… Thank you so much.”
She lingers at the door as she hears Samira’s footsteps creak along the hallway back to her door. After a moment, she goes back to the bathroom and takes another two hours to shave off the hair on her entire body. She even takes a pair of scissors to her head of hair, which at this point had changed hue to an oily pitch blackness, slicing away until only a short layer of hair cut close to her head remains. Then she goes back to her bed and lays down. She tries to distract herself with movies, but eventually she falls asleep again. When her eyes open back up, it is past midnight.
She rubs her eyes and then leans over to turn on the lights. With the lamp next to her bed on, she sees that the hair growing unceasingly on her hands has returned. Bringing her fingers closer to her face, she can see clearly: all of the fingernails on both of her hands are gone. All that remains where they once were is smooth pale skin, with the faint hints of prickly stubble already beginning to grow out of the flat nail beds. She checks her feet too, and sees the same: all the nails, gone.
Alice attempts to get out of bed but ends up just falling out of it, collapsing onto the floor. She begins to sob, a crumpled mess of a woman on the carpeted floor of her room. She struggles to her feet and crawls to her living room, collapsing onto the couch and drifting back to sleep, a pile of greasy hair sobbing itself to sleep.
She wakes up to the sound of the phone ringing. Her mind a foggy clouded mess, she drags herself to the phone and picks it up.
“Alice? Alice, is that you?”
“Mandy?”
“You finally picked up!”
“...Finally?”
“Alice, you gotta come in to work today, they’re gonna fire you if you take one more day of unexcused leave.”
“I’ve… only been gone for… two days, why would they fire me? Didn’t… didn’t you tell them I was sick?”
“I did, but I couldn’t tell them what you were sick with!”
“Don’t… worry about it… It’ll be fine…”
As Mandy continues to talk, Alice hangs up and collapses back on the floor. She grabs the corner of the table and pulls herself up, only to be overwhelmed by a sudden gagging. After a few desperate, wide eyed moments, she hocks up a slimy ball of tangled hair, that slides onto the table and rolls over to the furthest edge. She stands straight up and stares at it, sitting there like a dinner guest waiting to be served. In a sudden burst of frantic motion, she rushes back to her room and grabs a piece of paper to write on.
A moment later she is knocking on Samira’s door, leaving a slimy wet trail from her ever lengthening hair behind her, the sweaty scribbled note dropped on the floor as she runs back to her apartment and slams the door. Half an anxious minute passes and she hears a knock on her door.
“Alice? Are you in there?”
“Yeah, yeah I’m here… you can uh, come in, the door is unlocked.”
The door opens with an ungreased creak before it sticks on a knotted bunch of greasy hair clumped up behind it. “Alice, I was getting really worried, are you…” As her eyes adjust to the dim light of the rest of the room, she lets out a gasp and staggers back. Before her isn’t her cute neighbor, the neighbor that she knew so well; instead there is a mass of greasy black hairs, a pile of writhing fur with only the vaguest outline of a human head, small piercing blue eyes staring out from between the cascading hairs. “Alice, what the fuck!”
“Samira… I’m so sorry… I don’t know why this is happening, but… since last week it’s been… it’s been growing, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m…” Overcome by sobbing, the tears flow down the hair hiding her face. “I’m scared, Samira. I, I trust you, I just… I need help.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this, I… I don’t even know where to begin, Alice. Did you go to a doctor?”
“I haven’t been able to leave the building for days…”
Shivering, Samira pauses and thinks to herself. “Let me… get you some stuff from my apartment, I’ll be right back!” The young woman dashes into the hallway, leaving Alice alone in the silence of her living room, the faint slimy swaying and creaking growth of her oily hair the only sounds in the air.
Twenty minutes later Samira returns, a tote bag over one shoulder. “Have you eaten at all?”
Alice shakes her head. Samira smiles, though her hands shake, as she pulls out a thermos.
“Chicken noodle,” she laughs awkwardly, “I guess this is more serious than a cold. But hey, maybe it’ll help anyway.”
Despite everything, Alice can’t help but laugh along. Alice smiles, and though Samira can’t see it, she smiles back too. Stepping over the long, flowing tentacles of hair, she brings the thermos to Alice’s face, gently pushing the hair out of the way to allow her to sip. As Samira pulls the thermos back, she notices something in Alice’s mouth, her eyes going wide in shock.
“Alice! There’s… there’s hair on your gums!”
“What? What the fuck, there’s…?” Alice opens her mouth wide, showing off her tongue, her teeth, her soft and hard palate. The whole thing is covered with a layer of slimy slick black hair, dripping with drool oils, globs of chicken noodle cloying to the surface. Alice’s yellowing teeth peek out from between the black hairs, the one shock of color in a mass of putrid night. Samira just wordlessly nods.
Alice tries to get to her feet, to go to the bathroom to… shave her mouth. Her eyes are filled with fear and anxiety, her furry fingers grasping for her mouth, desperately trying to find her lips, her teeth hidden among the dark forest. But she can’t get up, weighed down by the freakish growth, the knots of hairs wrapping around table legs and chairs completely obscured by the mass. As Samira steps back, she suddenly lets out a scream that catches Alice’s attention.
“What the fuck Alice? Something just fucking bit me, oh my god I’m fucking bleeding!” A fountain of red pouring down her leg, the rivulets burying themselves in Alice’s hair.
“Bit? You just got… Sorry, sorry, are you okay?”
“No I’m not fucking okay! There’s shit crawling around in there Alice!”
“I… I haven’t noticed anything… I’m so sorry…”
As Samira steadily attempts to extricate herself from the hair, long reddish brown insectile limbs, tipped with cloying claws and lined with barbs, reach out to grab her. Shrieking, she yanks herself away, although the insect claws tear her shirt apart. “Fuck! No!” Alice reaches out to her, but Samira recoils.
“Alice, I… I care about you, but this is… this is just awful. I’m sorry. I can’t.” She shakes her head and rushes for the door, slamming it behind her.
Suddenly aware of the teeming crawling bugs in her hair, from the smallest nit to whatever the hell it was that tried to grab Samira just then, she begins to cry. She can barely get some rest through the constant sensation of her hair growing and the feeling of the flea things crawling through it all, but eventually she drifts off to a hopeless sleep.
She doesn’t even know how long she was out when she comes to. A thin sliver of light pierces the room through the edge of the curtain, allowing her to just barely make out that the entire room, half of her whole apartment, is covered with her horrible hairs. She starts to cry again, burying her furry face in her hairy hands, the tears flowing like a river down her hair. The spilled soup is a caked up mess where her chest must be, Samira’s blood dried in clumps down on the floor by the door. Taking her hands down for a moment, she just stares absentmindedly at the room. For hours, all she does is cry and stare around the room in silence, abandoned. As the day drags on, the line of light from the edge of the window slowly drags across the room. As it settles on the kitchen counter, a glint of light catches Alice’s attention. The knife rack!
Struggling against her hairs, she desperately pulls herself over to the counter. She can feel the hairs embedded in her skin being violently yanked out, the knots wrapped around the table legs pulling her back like octopus tentacles. A few scant tears drip down her hairy face as she inches nearer to the counter, what she would have done in only a few seconds instead taking ages. The searing pain as more and more hairs are pulled out, as knots in her hair force themselves apart on the furniture, as unseen insectile horrors bite into her supple flesh. She barely even knows how on earth she did it, but eventually she reaches the counter, and she pulls out the knife, the biggest knife she owns, and begins to cut the hairs away.
frees her arms from the knotted mess they were trapped in. Taking the knife to slice away the long hairs on her torso, a barb mouthed bug pounces out of the mass at her. With an angry scream, she stabs at the thing, and before it can jump away the knife shoves it into the wall, its legs squirming desperately. She reaches for another blade, cutting away the long hairs, leaving a short layer across her entire body. After a frantic few minutes of slicing, she is left with a floor that looks like a barber shop on a very busy day, and six lifeless insects with knives clean through them. She gingerly steps out of the mass of hair, and immediately marches off to the bathroom.
The sickening yellow fluorescent light flickers on. Her crazed piercing blue eyes stare back at her through the mirror, but the face she sees there is not her own. She doesn’t even take a second to think about it. She doesn’t grab the razor or the shaving cream. She takes the kitchen scissors, the last sharp not embedded in a giant louse or flea, and she slides the tip into her skin. The blood comes out in a dripping, spurting droves, crimson in the yellow bathroom light, dripping down her thigh, down her calf, onto the floor. A bright red puddle begins to form beneath her. Wordlessly, she digs the sharp scissor blade deeper into her leg, cutting through the pain. Her fingers grip the handle tightly as she slides the edge of it just underneath her skin, freeing up the outer layers, revealing the juicy wet meat inside. The roots of the hairs go deeper than she thought, deeper than she could have imagined, she keeps digging into her thigh with the scissors, blood seeping from the cuts. It takes some time, but eventually she is able to do it; she slides the skin off her leg like a tall sock, and with some finagling around the spindly bones of her foot she degloves the whole affair.
The same fate befalls her other leg, and then her left arm. She clumsily begins with her right arm, grasping the bloodstained scissors tight in her shaking left hand. A rage filled grunt escapes her clenched lips when an accidental nudge with the scissors digs a gash into her shoulder, but she keeps slicing. The mirror is streaked with bloody fingerprints from attempts to use it as a guide, the floor a flood of blood. She slides her arm skin off from the flesh, dripping blood splattering on the ground like rain. Taking the scissors in both hands, she slices into her stomach and begins the process, methodically cutting away the hair, the skin. The blade tickles her ribs as she slides it up along the side of her torso, before inserting it between the bone and skin to wrench the two apart like deboning a fish. Her torso comes off in two pieces, like an old suit of armor, the black hairs on her breasts and belly glistening with slick blood in the bathroom light.
Finally, her face. She stares at it in the mirror for a moment. The point of the scissor, now long caked with blood and blunted from so much slicing, slides just in front of her ear, slipping over the cheek bones. Her eyes gaze out from the gory scene as she removes her lips and her chin, as she cuts away her scalp. Her face falls into her blood filled sink in one piece, staring back up at her, the inside of a wolfman mask.
She steps out of the bathroom, staggering in pain, wincing with every step as her bloody bony feet plod along the floor. Behind her, her skin in piles, her blood in pools and dripping streaks. She comes to the door and opens it, leaving a mark of her presence every step of the way, her bloody hand gripping the doorknob tight. Each step across the hallway, each step to Samira’s door, the door looming back at her from across the hall. Each step leaves a bloody footprint on the carpet. Her breathing is haggard, her scarlet chest rising and falling with every shallow breath. She comes to Samira’s door, raises her shivering fist, and knocks. Samira’s voice from the other side, saying something to her grandma that can’t be made out. The door creaks open. Samira on the other side, her eyes wide as she freezes there in shock.
Alice manages to force out a desperate hoarse whisper. “Am I still… awful? Am I beautiful?”
Background image courtesy of FantasyStock on DeviantArt.
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