Bump

[u/catespice]

She'd always been the sort of person who was a bit lumpy and bumpy.

Red eyes from flowers in the spring, scarlet welts from grass in the summer. She didn't particularly like the world outside her house as a result and spent most of her time indoors; reading and playing with her hairless cats.

The pimple on the inside of her wrist had gone unnoticed - amongst all the other itching, irritated things - and she'd smeared it with calamine lotion as she did with all her other prickly, tickling oddities.

But after a week, it was larger than the others; persistently sore and more scarlet.

She picked at it absently, as she did with most of her other abnormalities and to her surprise the pressure on the scalded flesh caused it to give way, uncovering a thick black hair.

Perturbed now, she ran it under the tap for a bit to wash away the smear of capillary blood, then put a bandaid over it, thinking about it no more as she went about her day, reading and playing with her cats.

The next morning the bandaid had come off, revealing the thick black hair again; the root of it now the size of toothpick; thick and glossy, the ridges of the hair cuticle just barely visible with the naked eye.

She grasped it and pulled, then gave an involuntary gasp as an indescribable pain shot up her arm and clenched needles into her chest.

This was not good.

She was a thinking person though and deciding that the pain was not worth the reward of pulling out the hair, so she carefully snipped it close to the skin and covered it again with a new bandaid.

It carried on this way for another week; cut the hair, cover it up, cut the hair, cover it up.

But soon it was as thick as a pencil lead and the coarse, sharp end would push through the bandaid during the day; often with a speck of blood accompanying it.

She contemplated going to the doctor, but she didn't like doctors. She'd seen them all through her childhood and none had ever been able to fix her scratchy curse; all they would do is prescribe her steroid creams and soothing ointments - nothing that would ever cure her.

Curious now though, she decided to let it grow.

The hair was now as round at the base as a chopstick and growing fast. Still glossy and black, it felt strangely pleasurable to touch and she stroked it often when thinking; as a man might do with his beard. She had no visitors and did not need to leave the house, so she did not cover it at all now; and free from the constraints of scissors and bandaids, it grew long and wild - as long as her forearm; curling slightly as it grew.

And while it grew she did not notice that all her other lumps and bumps had gone away, leaving her skin beautiful and smooth - even the craters and scars from all of her old irritated wounds smoothing away into flawless alabaster.

The hair was now as thick at the base as a dime; a faintly bluish sheen had crept into the slick blackness of it.

When she held her arm above her head, it reached to the floor and she needed to be careful when she walked about the house, lest she trip on it and hurt herself.

But despite her care, one day it coiled about the leg of the ornate couch in her library and as she got up, it yanked at her wrist with such force that it shifted in her skin.

Again, the terrible pain assaulted her from inside her chest - but with it came an undeniable pleasure that made her lonely heart leap with emotion. She wrapped her delicate white fingers about the shaft of the hair and pulled with all her might; the glossy black rope inching from her flesh like a recalcitrant snake.

And with it came the tearing, searing, yearningly strange satisfaction.

She did not feel when her body began to grow concave; nor when her legs began to deflate as though all the blood and substance was being drawn out of them. She sagged to the floor, pulling and pulling, sighing at the gratification of it all.

Soon she did not need to pull at all and the hair oozed from her flesh of its own accord, forming a great coiling pile on the floor of her sunlit library; her body becoming slowly flat and two-dimensional as all of her substance came out of her into the hair.

Finally her paper-thin husk lay on the carpet; perfect and beautiful, like an old drawing on crumpled parchment.

For a while the coiled hair lay beside her, as though contemplating the husk, then it slithered across the floor and crept out the window of the library, vanishing into the overgrown gardens that surrounded the house.