I once read a story about this guy who wanted to quit smoking and so he went to a hypnotist and the hypnotist fixed him by hypnotizing him into associating smoking with eating a bowl of hair as if it was spaghetti. It was a story as horrific as today’s lecture on anorexia and the way downy hair can grow all over your body to keep you warm if you starve yourself enough.

My sister and I shared a secret of our plucked hairs.

She filled a ceramic box she made in third grade with a select few, and sometimes we marveled at their dead bodies,

slipping them across our fingerprints or even our tongues.

I passed on the technique of pulling out the evil hairs just as I taught her to pick her nose and eat it when we were little:

Find a coarse one.

Isolate it.

Glide your fingers across it.

Relish in the pain of a single strand under strain.

Worship your kill, waste not,

savor the chosen strand.

In the morning I turn onto my side and stare at a twisted tangle of my shed hair

now clinging to his bare back, cleaved from

myself, a parasitic gift.