When I was twenty-four, I discovered a hair, the length of a unicorn horn, growing out of my lower back. I felt like a marionette in control of its own body. My then-boyfriend was drying his face with a washcloth. He was lanky and angular, his chest smooth. "Look, a web," I bragged, shirt lifted, sliding the hair gently between the tips of my pointer finger and thumb. He wanted to remove it with tweezers. "No," I said. After all, who knew how many years I had spent unwittingly coaxing the silver strand out of my spine. It was practically invisible in the bathroom light. When I straightened it, revolved to find a good view, it shimmered taut with centrifugal force. I was radiating. He had just begun flossing when I felt the rip -- flush from the root in a singular fluid motion, right out of my hands -- leaving me stupefied, emptied. He held it up to the mirror for close inspection. My loss doubled: power and power reflected. "Got it," he said, pretending to work the hair back and forth between his uniform bottom teeth. We kept it in the medicine cabinet, weighed down underneath a bar of hotel soap, for weeks. There I would sneak periodic looks until it finally lost its pulse. It blanched the color of an arctic fox pelt. No longer lambent. Rosewood scented, a thing dead to me.
so cool.
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