It must’ve been in the tuna salad I ate for lunch. I could feel it back in my throat. This irritating tickle, followed by the disgusting realization there’s a hair in my mouth. Both the tickling and the realization made me almost gag.
I spent the rest of my lunch bent over a sink in the mens room, desperately trying to spit the hair out. But the thing seemed to have a will of its own, actively hiding inside my mouth. Teasing me. Making me put my fingers in there.
They tasted like salt and filth.
After a while I had to give up, I couldn’t feel the hair anymore but hadn’t gotten it out either. I wondered if I had accidentally swallowed it. A thought that made me retch a bit once again. I tried convincing myself that I had gotten it out without noticing. Either way I really had to go back to work. But first I went to the cooler, feeling a desperate need to thoroughly rinse my mouth out.
In spite of the lingering taste of my own fingers, I managed to push the unpleasant experience off of my mind, whilst back at my desk. The spreadsheets across the multiple screens in front of me helped with that. And I would’ve probably forgotten the whole incident if it weren’t for a tiny, tiny tickle in my throat, later that afternoon.
It started during a big meeting with the boss. Just my luck I guess. I tried to be discreet by clearing my throat as quietly as I possible could. To my relief I felt the hair losing its grip in my throat and I tried cornering it with my tongue. The procedure acquired my whole attention, but after what felt like an eternity, I finally felt the hair being pined down. With a pleasurable sensation I could feel this elongated, cylindrical shape glide forward against the uneven roof of my mouth. Eagerly pushed onward by the tip of my tongue.
It wasn’t until I, with palpable excitement, could grasp the hair with my fingertips that I realized I was getting some weird looks from some of my surrounding colleagues.
I smiled awkwardly at the elderly woman seated opposite myself. It was Hillary from economics, who glared at me with a mixture of disgust and dismay. I sat up a bit straighter in the chair and pretended to focus wholly at the presentation. I had to fight the urge to examine the hair until the meeting was over. I then went straight to the bathroom and got a good look at it. It was coarse, thick and quite long. And most disturbing of all, it was definitely not one of my own hairs. Disgusted, I threw it in the bin, or at least I tried to. The hair clinged to my hand now. When it finally was gone I washed my hands carefully. I also rinsed my mouth out with the facet water. Bending my neck awkwardly in front of the facet, trying to get as much as possible of the clear stream of freshness into my mouth.
When I finally got back to my desk the project leader approached me. She casually asked me where I had disappeared to for so long after the meeting. I didn’t really feel like I had a satisfying answer to her question. So I told a little lie about having stomach issues after lunch. My project leader looked at me with concern and nodded. She confirmed that I looked a bit pale. She even asked me if I wanted to go home and rest. I told her I was fine and assured her I felt much better already. She didn’t really look convinced though. But at least she left me alone after that.
Finally alone I realized I had no idea of what had been decided at the meeting earlier. I spent the rest of the workday trying to figure that out.
I headed home later than usual that evening. Before I drove out of the office parking lot I texted my wife an heartfelt apology. I was speeding a bit on the way home, but it wasn’t that much, sincerely! But a tickle in my throat distracted me long enough that I missed the speed control. The officer who waved me down would’ve probably just handed me the ticket and let me be on my way, if that tickle in my throat hadn’t made me look so uneasy. Instead I got put through a sobriety test and a search of both myself and my vehicle, before the officer reluctantly let me drove off. All while the tickle just grew worse and worse.
Absent-minded I slowly drove the last part home. Where my wife questioned me about my tardiness. All whilst Max, our two year old, throw himself at me. Demanding I would play with him.
My wife wasn’t happy about the ticket, the least to say. And I couldn’t really blame her. We ate a late dinner. It was a silent meal where both me and my wife focused all our attention on Max, while avoiding looking at each other. The constant tickle in my throat was almost a pleasant distraction from the tension between me and my wife. But as it turned out it also distracted her. After awhile she asked me why I hadn’t touched my food? And why I was constantly clearing my throat? I said something about not having an appetite, and my wife immediately started interrogating me: Did I have a sore throat? Was anyone sick at work? And so on. She even insisted on checking me for a fever. It actually was kind of nice, she forgot all about the speeding ticket and was all sweet and caring. But I did feel a bit guilty for lying to her. So I tried to brush my “symptoms” off as a simple cold or something like that. And not making a big deal of it. But apparently the thermometer actually showed I had a bit of a fever. I used that as an excuse to leave the diner table.
I told my wife I would go to bed, but instead I locked myself inside the upstairs bathroom. There I inspected my on reflection in the mirror above the sink. I had to admit, I did look a bit pale. Maybe I actually was coming down with something? But then the tickle interrupted my concerns.
It couldn’t be another hair, it just couldn’t be! I cleared my throat and spat into the sink. A yellowish blob of phlegm dangled close at the end of a dark, coarse hair. With horror i saw, and felt, the blob move further down the long hair dangling from my open mouth, and finally fall down into the sink. I stared at the blob, watched it slowly gliding down the curved ceramic bowl. I could feel every movement of the hair all the way deep down into my guts. I didn’t dare to look up at my own reflection. If I actually saw the hair hanging out of my mouth, still connected to another part of itself, the part I could feel in my throat, I would probably have lost it.
Instead I tried to breathe calmly, with the hair moving in sync with the gentle breeze from my in- and exhaling of air. When I decided that my hand where steady enough I then carefully grabbed the cursed thing between my right thumb and index-finger. The sound of my heartbeats were deafening in my ears while I gently started to pull the hair out of my body. I could had sworn that the hair had a pulse but, as an act of mental self-preservation I brushed it of as a figment of my own stressed out imagination. Still I could feel it, a faint but steady beat under my fingertips.
Slowly, slowly I pulled it out of me. Inch by inch the hair started to build up a pile in the bottom of the sink. Like a tiny rope it neatly layered itself in a circle. Every once a while a part of the hair that slided up through my throat and out of my mouth was covered in fat blobs of that yellowish phlegm. Both the feel and look of it made me retch and several times I was sure I would throw up. But i never stopped pulling at the hair, and eventually the heaves would stop.
I have no idea how long I stood there pulling, it felt like hours but might have been less than twenty minutes, until i felt it snap. The hair had broken off somewhere deep inside of me. Don’t ask me how I can be so sure, but I know I felt it snap off. I literally felt it in my gut.
I pulled the last part out of me. The dark, thick hair ended with the largest blob yet and i couldn’t have dropped it fast enough into the sink. It slouched down and joined the rest of the hair-pile. I didn’t measure it, but I realized it was too long to try and wash down the drain.
With several layers of toilet paper I picked it up and threw it in the toilet, where I flushed it as fast as I could. Feeling numb in both body and mind I went to bed, almost collapsing into it. My last thought before I drifted off into a sleep deep enough to mimic a coma, was a memory of an picture I once saw. The image had been of an ant, eaten from the inside out by a parasitic worm. A worm that deliberately eaten the ant alive without damaging its exoskeleton, muscles or nerves. In this way the worm could use the ants body as a vehicle for its own legless and over-dimensional body. A body that sprouted out of the ants different orifices as curled, pale spaghetti.
I woke up in the dark coughing my lungs out. I felt my wife move beside me, and heard her alarmed voice asking what was wrong. I didn’t answer her, instead I fell out of bed, cramping and heaving. In the darkness I felt something glide out of me. something long and extremely thin. Something with a pulse. When my wife got the light turned on there was only a large pile of yellow phlegm on the floor beside where my head has landed. But from my horizontal position I could see the faint light reflect itself on the finest shiny trail leading from the pile of phlegm. A trail not wider than a hair, and it led to the open bedroom door and into the darkness outside of it. Before I passed out I heard my wife calling for an ambulance.
The next thing I knew I was laying in a hospital-bed.
I’m writing this down on my phone while my wife’s talking to the doctors. I want to share my story in case this doesn’t end well. The medical team that’s handling me are dumbfounded. They don’t want to tell me anything until they’re sure, but one doctor mentioned something about a possible parasitic infection.
I knew that hair wasn’t mine.