Maidenhair

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Melanie looked at the jar in her hands, it was squat and wide, and empty. She unscrewed the lid and ran her finger around the inside, just to make sure. Two weeks. It had been two weeks since she’d bought the jar from a little old lady on the street. A little old lady with lush, shiny white hair down to her waist. Melanie touched her head and felt her own hair, thick and soft. She looked down, it fell around her as she sat, then it spread out, creeping along the dusty wood plank floor of the attic, covering almost the entire space in tendrils and piles of dark, glossy tresses. Was it worth it?

Her stomach growled.

The whispers started.

She couldn’t put the whispers into words, they vibrated their needs through her entire body and she understood, but she couldn’t translate. Melanie watched as her flesh rippled with the whispers. She set down the jar and picked up a box.

“Thinning hair?” The little old lady had said as Melanie walked past in hurry, late for work again. She’d spent too much time, again, trying to coax her wispy locks into something resembling a style. She stopped, reached fingertips under the beret she’d eventually resigned herself too, and thought of the fistful of hair she’d flushed down the toilet that morning. The little old lady smiled, and with a subtle head shake her long, silky hair rippled in a shiny wave. Melanie looked around, people walked past, paying her and the little old lady no attention.

“How did you know?”

“Growing hair is my livelihood. I can see it in your eyes, you lack the confidence of a woman with beautiful hair.” She was small and wearing a long, red wool coat, a plain canvas tote bag was slung over her shoulder. Her eyes were pale blue, Melanie found it hard to look into them.

“So why are you selling on street corners?”

“I sell online, too, but I like people. I get lonely. I also hit farmers’ markets.”

Melanie nodded, she understood loneliness. “Yeah, that makes sense. You use it I guess?”

“Yep, I have.”

“Have? But not anymore, like you don’t have to keep using it?” Melanie’s heart thumped in her chest. With pretty hair she could date again.

“Terrible business model really, creating a product that works. But a lonely woman breaks my heart, you rub this on your scalp every night for one week, and one week only, then, hey bam!” She flipped her hair.

Melanie’s eyes followed the thick, snowy cascade back down to the woman’s side and thought about her own, short, crispy thin wisps.

“How much?”

“One hundred, even.”

Melanie scrunched up her face.

“It’s a one time purchase. How much have you already spent on all the other things you’ve tried?”

“Yeah, you know what, that is a really good point.” Melanie dove into her purse. To be honest she didn’t even want to know how much she’d already spent on pills, shampoos, rinses, creams… therapy. “Ugh, I only have eighty on me.”

The old woman snatched the money from her hand, “Not a problem, I’ll take eighty.” Before Melanie could speak again, there was a glass jar in her hand and the little old lady was walking away.

“Don’t forget!” She yelled over her shoulder, “Don’t use it any longer than one week, it’s vitally important.”

Melanie moved to follow her but the flow of pedestrians had swallowed her up. The lady was gone. She looked down at the jar, a single word, “Maidenhair” was printed in black lettering on a clear label. No ingredients, no manufacturing information. Just that one word. The substance inside was the color of honey. Melanie dropped it in her purse and continued on to work. She’d done stupider things in the name of beauty…

Her jaw worked up and down as she dropped the granola bar wrapper onto the floor and opened up another from the box. She couldn’t really taste it anymore, the whispers didn’t care how things tasted. They wanted her belly full. Melanie thought about it as she chewed, reached into the dark susurration that was the past week, yeah, the last thing she remembered tasting was her mother’s spaghetti sauce. The whispers shush shushed and wriggled into her brain and soon she couldn’t remember her mother or the sauce as she crammed another flavorless bar into her mouth. Moonlight, sliced up by the slatted dormer vent, fell across Melanie’s carpet of hair in thick slivers. The whispers uncurled her fingers, she dropped the half-eaten bar and crept carefully across the attic floor. The house below her was quiet, dark. Sleeping.

Melanie stood at her bathroom mirror and looked at the loose strands of wet hair intertwined in her fingers. She stretched her fingers apart to count the individual strands as the moist hair slid across her dry skin. Twenty? Thirty? In the mirror she could see her pale scalp easily through the sparse cover. It was like pictures of a forest after a fire. Just a few lone, leafless tree trunks sticking up out of a barren, ash covered landscape. She’d been to the doctor, they said it was just aging. Had she talked to her family? It was probably genetic. Her mother had said no, no, her ugly daughter was the only one with this problem and declared that Melanie had always been nervous, like a small dog. Was she sure she didn’t pull it out in her sleep? Yes, mother, she was certain. She had taken prescriptions, but their side effects made them unbearable. What was the point of having a beautiful head of hair if one also couldn’t sleep and broke out in a rash in the sun? So had reached rock bottom, then? Buying unknown substances from total strangers on the street?

Great.

Melanie grabbed the jar and scooped out a glob on her shaking fingers, it smelled like honey. It looked like honey, too, but with mashed up bits of plants. She slathered the goop all over her scalp and covered it with a shower cap. Out of sight, out of mind. It felt unnaturally cold though… Why was she scared of a little old lady? Like she was going to poison random people? Melanie puffed out her cheeks, letting go of her anxiety in a big exhale.

“The worst that can happen is nothing,” she told herself in the mirror, “The worst that can happen is nothing.”

The whispers shivered through her. Melanie smiled and rubbed the undulating flesh of her arms. Her hair rippled around along the attic floor, rustling the empty husks of plastic water bottles and granola bars. She jammed a screwdriver into a hole in one of the floor planks, twisting and grinding it around and down. The whispers tickled Melanie’s insides and she stifled a laugh, jamming the screwdriver harder into the hole. She’d been working on it for two nights. The whispers insisting that they needed to see. Replacing the screwdriver with her finger she dug out chunks of wood and grainy sawdust, ignoring splinters. The whispers tickled and she stabbed the floor with the screwdriver again. And again.

Melanie took her hat off and shook out her hair. It had been a week and two days since she’d met the old woman in the street and she had three times the amount of hair she’d had then. Her mother reached up and touched her glossy locks.

“Ow!”

“Had to make sure it wasn’t extensions,” her mother shrugged.

“It’s real hair, I found an amazing serum.” Melanie put her hat down on the green formica kitchen table, the scent of her mother’s fresh garlic bread in the oven made her mouth water.

Her mother looked at her over the rim of her glasses, “Where?”

“A boutique seller, it’s called Maidenhair.”

“Not FDA approved I take it?”

“Is any hair product FDA approved?”

Her mother waved her off, “You have to be careful, Lenny, you never know what people will sell you.”

“Well, I’m done with it anyway. You only have to use it for one week.” A white lie, there had been goop left over and the old woman’s warning hadn’t really made sense. So she’d continued, she’d just use it until it was gone.

“Terrible business model.” Her mother went back to stirring her homemade spaghetti sauce on a stove the same avocado color as the kitchen table. Melanie’s stomach growled. She’d been hungrier than usual the last couple of days. She opened the fridge and looked inside.

“Do you not see me slaving over this hot stove?”

“Mom, I’m starving. Don’t you have some lunch meat or something?”

“You can wait for ten more minutes. Close the fridge.”

Melanie stood up straight and slammed the fridge. Her mother threw a raised eyebrow over her shoulder.

“Sorry,” she muttered, shivering as something whispered through her, something hungry.

She felt the screwdriver give and fell forward a bit, gasping in surprise. She’d made it through the drywall in the ceiling. The whispers tightened inside her and began a frenetic vibration. Her hair rustled as she bent down to the hole, putting her forehead against the wood. It was dark in the room, she couldn’t see anything, but an oscillating fan rustling posters on the walls. Something soft and silky slipped under her cheek and she moved, a few strands of her hair slipped down into the opening. The whispers coiled around her empty gut and shivered. They had found what they were looking for.

Melanie carefully pushed down the ladder hatch that led from the attic to the house. Her hair coiled around the sliding part of the extension ladder and let it slowly and quietly extend to the ground. She climbed down. The whispers guided her to the correct door and helped her turn the handle slowly. The desire to run lit her neurons like a muzzle flash, the whispers caught the bullet, put out the light, and took her into the room. The hum of the fan and the rustling of the posters on the walls were familiar and soothing as she walked barefoot across carpet. Some of her hair observed the silence of the rest of the house. Some reached up and wound around the food’s neck so it couldn’t scream. The whispers vibrated. Melanie sliced open the food. It was warm and wet inside, blood welling up and spilling out in jubilant red. She climbed on the bed dug for the liver, the whispers showed her where to look. She cut the large, slippery meat free from its container and took a bite. The ravenous whispers reached up into her throat as she swallowed, forgetting her need to digest before they could feed. She drank blood for them. She ate the heart meat, too. When they were satiated, the whispers took her back to the attic to rest. The hair erased her bloody tracks as she ascended, soaking up stray droplets and smudges of blood. Growing more beautiful. As it pulled the attic door shut behind them, an alarm clock rang somewhere else in the house.

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