Sarah had spent years trying to remove the hair on her legs, but the hairs fought back. If she shaved, she’d only graze herself and wreck the blades. If she waxed, the hair would rip out in agonising patches, then her skin would become puckered and pimpled. Lasers glanced off them; depilatory creams melted her skin, but not the hair.
One day, Sarah was in a pharmacy and found, pushed back on the bottom shelf, a purple glass bottle labelled “Hinkle’s Patent Compound for the Removal of Hair”. There was no further information. The bottle looked very old. She showed it to the shop assistant. “That’s not ours,” she said. “Someone must have left it behind. Could you take it to the cashier to put behind the counter?”
“Sure,” said Sarah, but instead she slipped the bottle into her handbag.
That night, she opened the bottle. It was filled with a blue-grey jelly that smelled polluted and shameful. She smeared it over her legs and went to sleep.
She woke to the alien sensation of her calves rubbing together, the skin of one gliding smoothly over the other. She looked down to see nothing but pale white skin, flawless, with no hair in sight. Delighted, she put on a mini skirt and spent the day parading her bare legs in public.
The next morning, Sarah woke in pain. She looked down and gasped. Ripping through the surface of her skin, like a pencil through paper, were thousands of black hairs, as pointed and as thick as dry pasta. Sarah scrambled for the bottle of Hinkle’s and emptied the rest of it onto the hairs. There was only enough to cover one leg, where the hairs immediately started falling out. The skin of that leg repaired itself before her eyes.
She went to get more Hinkle’s from the Pharmacy, but there was none there. When she asked, nobody knew what she was talking about. She went home and stared at her one perfect and one corrupted leg. Finally, she got a pair of scissors and began hacking away at the hairs, aggravating the skin around them.
The next morning she woke in even more pain. The leg she had hacked at with scissors was patchy and inflamed, but her previously smooth leg was now covered in even thicker hairs. They had the girth and texture of udon noodles and were slimy to the touch. Horrified, she ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. She sliced at the wormy hairs on her legs. They carved off easily and dropped to the floor, but Sarah wailed as more pain shot through her legs and blood oozed from the cuts she’d made. In a fever, she hacked at her legs, blood pouring from dozens of wounds, until she passed out from the pain.
Sarah woke hyperventilating in her own blood. She had to look for her phone and call an ambulance. She forced herself to sit up, but found she couldn’t move further. She was anchored to the kitchen floor. In the pool of blood were hundreds of black, snake-like coils, as thick as hosepipe, wrapped around and around her and sucking onto the floor like leeches. Sarah started ripping and pulling to try and get them off her body, but it was no use—they were coming out of her legs.
As she attacked them, the ropes began to move, just a little bit at first, escalating to a writhing frenzy. A leech-head detached itself from the floor and lifted to face her. Its wide-toothed mouth opened and shrieked. The noise awakened the rest of the nest. Her vision filled with her hairs, eyeless, round-mouthed heads that opened and shrieked before biting and ripping at her face and body.
As the life drained out of her, she saw herself in a short dress; her legs covered in silky dark hair, soft and luxuriant, flowing in a pattern like water in a river.