MY TRICHOBEZOAR
MY TRICHOBEZOAR
by Liz Rosen
I could tell her how the Sultans displayed them in gold boxes adorned with filigree and flowers like asphodel and hellebore. Or that the nobility of Europe so coveted them for their healing properties that they paid the Arabic traders who passed through court small fortunes to acquire them. But that would require her to see more than the hairy scrotum-like thing that the surgeon has thoughtfully deposited into a jar for me.
He wants to gross me out, to show me the real-life implications of my compulsion. The disgust in my mother’s face as she catches a glimpse of the knotty lump resting against the side of the glass like a shaggy, stunted carrot makes it clear that no proof of the thing’s historic medicinal or mystical value will convince her it is anything other than a horror, and me with it.
The surgeon gently places the jar on the table next to my bed. “Normally,” he says, more to my mother than me, “we refer these cases to the psychiatric team.”
As my mother and the surgeon talk in low tones about my out-patient therapy and social workers who will be assigned the case and whether or not insurance will pay for this sort of thing, I turn my face away and look out the window. My room is on the tenth floor of the hospital, so all I see out the glass is a white sky. My incisions itch and my fingers curl with the desire to scratch at the glue holding the laparoscopic cuts closed. Instead, I discretely pick at the corner of the iodine-stained bandage that covers the incision.
“Honey?” My mother is standing at my bedside, her cool hand, soft with carefully applied night creams, stroking my forearm with concern. She deliberately keeps her eyes from the intestine-shaped troglodyte in the jar. “What do you think? Please say that you will talk to the psychiatrist.”
They can’t understand. Even as my eyes fluttered open in recovery, my fingers were reaching for my hair out of habit, searching for a strand to pluck, roll, and tuck into my mouth, a talisman, a prayer, a plan. If I hadn’t, the thing inside me would have continued to run free – and the thing inside me needed to be caught. The hair I swallow becomes first an obstacle course to slow it, then a trap holding it in place. I tuck my fingers under my hips to pin them there.
In the afternoon, my mother steps out to take a phone call. I hear her saying, “No, not anorexia. You won’t believe it,” as she pulls the door shut behind her. In the stillness that descends, I push one of the flower vases from the table next to me. The nurses surge into the room, all panicked with the sound of breaking porcelain and something gone wrong. They sweep up every piece, except for the one shard I have hidden in my closed fist.
Later that night, in the semi-dim fluorescence of the quiet ward, I reach for the jar and dump the gnarled specimen onto the mattress between my legs. It reeks of bad breath and gastric juice. Despite the wire-like hairs stabbing my palm, I clench it in my hand. It is black, turd-like, but hard, with a long tail. It is much heavier than it looks at first, maybe four pounds, I estimate.
I have to know. I take the sharp-edged shard of porcelain and begin to cut and chip away at the mass. It looks like a dirty potato covered with grit and soil, but it doesn’t give under my makeshift scalpel like one. Between the raised knobs of my knees, I scatter pieces across my sheet as they break off, running my fingers through them quickly, rummaging, searching for the thing that was inside me, the thing of blackness so unforgiving it is like sleek obsidian spiraling round and around on itself in an inescapable funnel.
When the soft pneumatic pfft of the room door sounds, I lay down quickly and clench my legs over the mess on the mattress. I keep my thighs locked tight to hide it from the nurse who comes to take my temperature. As I lie under her tender ministrations, from the other side of my skin, a sharp stab of pain makes itself known. Still here, it raps at the underside of my incisions.
The nurse asks about my pain level. How can I explain to her that pain doesn’t look like what she imagines. Some pain isn’t measurable on her scale of one to ten. When she leaves, I push myself to a seated position again and spread my legs to look at the unsuccessful trap I had set. It was too small, too easy to escape.
There is no choice. No surgeon, no psychiatrist can catch the thing inside me. Between my fingers is the stray hair that I plucked from the back of the nurse’s sweater as she turned to fiddle with my I.V. Between my index finger and thumb, I roll it into a hard ball, put it into my mouth, and swallow. I gather the pieces of the first trap between my hands and begin to eat.
Fiction © Copyright Liz Rosen
Image created in Midjourney
Liz Rosen is a former Nickelodeon Television writer and a current short story writer who writes in both literary and speculative genres. After many years of watching ghost hunting shows, she has a finely developed “Did you hear that?!” Follow her on Instagram at @thewritelifeliz.
