Picking

I had a bad habit of picking at my eyelashes while working on something. I picked them and I had plucked off only half of some of them, leaving a weird little ridge at the end I made in it, which felt good to pull gently on. Pick pick pick. Sometimes I'd yank a new one out that was attempting to grow out again and it was a fresh eyelash, and it was almost an inky black - when I pulled it out, there was no sound like the kind scissors make, just a swift and bright kind of electric pain that ran through my entire body and my eye watered and it was gone. The root of it wasn't skin-colored yet, it was still the color of oil, wet, soft and smooth like dipping my hand in slowly running cool water. Sometimes I ran the root end along my lower lip to feel the softness.

The bottom eyelashes weren't that satisfying. There wasn't much feeling in my bottom eyelids - I don't know if that was just me or a universal thing - so there was no sweet pain when I picked them. The effect ended up being that all my top eyelashes were gone but the bottom ones were still intact. Like the guy in A Clockwork Orange.

I picked a fresh sprout of an eyelash. It was extraordinarily painful for only a moment and both my eyes watered. Strangely, for all its newness, there was quite a lot of flesh-colored stuff at the bottom. That was one deep root. It felt good.

I got my tweezers from my bathroom and sat on my sink, leaning in closely to the mirror. Usually I just pulled them out with my fingernails, but tweezers work just as well and my nails were beginning to hurt. I saw one little eyelash poking through my eyelid just barely enough to count as a sprout. My hands shook as I grabbed it with the tweezers and pulled hard.

After just a split second of a shocking, wonderful agony, it was gone. On my tweezers lay a tiny little stump of an eyelash.

I pulled one that wasn't so new, one that had a ridge on the end of it. I yanked hard on it and my eye protested, watering as though I'd been mincing onions for an hour, almost to the point where I couldn't see. That one had a deep root too.

There were huge gaps in my eyelashes. I looked like I've been punched, the eye I'd been working on was red from all the tears. I worked on the other eye instead. Pick pick pick pick pick. Goodbye, little fresh eyelashes. Pick pick pick. They were so soft, like the fine fur on cats or hamsters. The ones on the edges of my eyelids were explosively painful in an impressive and toe-curling way, but nothing compared to picking the new ones.

It soon became dark and I'd made a small pile of eyelashes, young and old, on my sink. I had no more left to pluck except for the ones on my bottom eyelid. I picked a hair off my scalp experimentally - it wasn't even close to as satisfying as picking thicker kinds of hair. I gave up on my hair and moved down to my eyebrows. Pick pick pick…

Soon my eyebrows were gone too. I made a mental note to draw them back on with eyeliner or something until they grow back.

The little fuzzy hairs on my arms weren't that great either but I picked those too. I'd shaved my legs recently but new hairs were beginning to poke through. I tore those off and those tiny pale hairs on my torso, and everywhere else I could reach. I sighed when I was finished, and thought, to myself, why not? and began to pluck my scalp.

I soon realized with the dawn that I had nothing left to pick but my bottom eyelashes. Those disappeared too.

I sat on my sink for a long while, looking at the pile of hair I'd amassed. That was actually pretty nasty. I never thought about it, but when hairs aren't attached to a human, they're much more gross than they ought to be. I scooped the whole mess into my trashcan. Out of habit I reached up to pick my eyelashes, but my eyes were completely bare. What to do, what to do, I thought, putting all my clothes back on.

I went back to my living room to watch TV and idly began to pick my toenails.