text: There’s a hair on your left arm that you never noticed before. Not that you usually notice your arm hairs, but this one was tough to miss. It was thicker than any of your other ones, and darker too. You give it a little tug and find it’s longer than you thought. You pull it a good four, five inches and there’s still more hair coming out. You take some scissors and cut it, or at least try. It’s a lot tougher than you thought: your scissors are ruined and the hair is still there. You give it another pull, just to see if there’s more, and there is. You take it about two feet before you stop, wondering if it ever ends. It never does. It doesn’t hurt when you pull it, though it does feel weird. You poke and prod the area around the hair, thinking something is maybe under your skin, but you feel nothing. You go to your parents who, in the course of their investigation, pull the hair another three feet, then conclude you should see a doctor. The doctor, after pulling the hair another foot, tries to x-ray your arm, but the machine breaks as soon as it’s turned on. They try again with another machine and that breaks too. The doctor tries cutting the hair, using a scalpel, an electric saw, a paper cutter, and even an antique Japanese knife a patient had on him. Nothing works. So they try surgery. You find this very scary and just want to go home and not think about this gross hair that’s coming out of your arm (and it is quite gross-you didn’t realize it at first, but now that there’s enough of it you realize it smells, very faintly, of bad BO.) Still, your parents agree, and you’re given something that makes you very sleepy. When you wake up, there’s a bandage on your arm and a doctor beside your bed, who says that they could not remove the hair. They tried digging it out by its root, but all they managed to do was break several scalpels. They also couldn’t find any reason why this one hair suddenly got so long, strong, and gross. They say the only way to really get rid of the hair would be to remove the arm. That makes both you and your parents very upset. So, your family tries other things. They try a blowtorch. They try a laser. They try a saw used to cut diamonds. Nothing works. Sometimes, like with the blowtorch, you only get hurt, because you find out the hair conducts heat very well. This goes on for weeks. The hair gets extremely long in the meantime. You do your best to be careful but sometimes you’re walking and it gets snagged on something and you don’t notice for a while until you look back and see you’ve added another ten feet or so. Or sometimes, in your sleep, it gets caught on your pillow and as you roll around in bed the hair gets longer with each movement of your arm. One time, the worst time, you got into a car and didn’t realize your hair had gotten wrapped around a tree branch and it took a few miles before you realized what had happened. You might have been able to tie it up before, when it was smaller, to keep these sort of things from happening, but now it has gotten much too large to manage. You have to coil it up like a garden hose to walk around, and it’s heavy and it’s stinky and it’s gross. So, eventually, you tell your parents that you just want them to chop off your arm. You’ve had enough. Your parents take you to the doctor’s again and, within a day, your arm is off. You’re sad-you and that arm had a lot of good memories-but you’re glad at least you don’t have to trail that hair anymore. A while later they take off your bandages and see how you’re healing. Sticking out of the stump, where your arm used to be, is another hair. Heart beating loudly, you grip it with your remaining hand and pull, hoping, praying, desperately wishing that it would just pluck out of your skin. It does not. It gets longer.