Cheryl is ten minutes early to her appointment when she catches Zel outside the salon, choking. “Oh, Hon,” Cheryl says, patting Zel’s back with a hand varnished with half-dried self-tanner. “You’ve got to quit those smokes… Unless you’ve got one for me.” Zel chuckles at the woman’s misjudgment —she has never contemplated cigarettes —and the laugh transpires into a cough. Zel violently hacks up bloody mucus and vomits onto the sidewalk. She gasps for air as the eyeless, sharp-toothed head of What’s Within sneaks out of its usual dank, bodily dungeon, ejects its entire body from her mouth, and plops onto the pavement with a wet squelch. It lies there like a severed braid. Zel shudders, awaiting Cheryl’s horrified reaction to what her client will surely mistake for a mutated tapeworm.

Actually, that isn’t too far from the truth.

The creature grows from hair that Zel compulsively eats. After years of the habit, What’s Within has morphed into a malevolent, eight-foot-long, slimy, bile-soaked, food-speckled hair-blockage that has backed up Zel’s plumbing.

Up to now, Zel has vowed to take this secret straight to the grave. But when Cheryl lays eyes on What’s Within writhing on the sidewalk, Zel can’t tell if her client wants to shriek or laugh. Instead, Cheryl composes herself, flashes a nervous smile, and says simply, “Let me go get you a bottle of water, hon. You just stay put,” before running into the bodega next door. After Cheryl leaves, What’s Within coils its slithery tongue and in a jolt, launches itself back into Zel’s mouth with impeccable accuracy, like a dart to a bullseye, to descend again into the pit of her stomach —but not before caressing its host’s uvula like a perverted voyeur on the subway.

Another day, Hannah comes to the shop. Zel senses Hannah watching her as she tears a sewn-in track of extensions from her scalp with a fleshy yank before sucking on the hair until it becomes a soaked cord. Then, Zel moves onto the weft itself, savoring the skin and blood that had stained it. Hannah looks on in silent terror as Zel unhinges her jaw and swallows the clump, forming it into a tubular heap as she struggles to force it all down. Afterward, she fixes her concealer, waves Hannah over, and sets up her station like nothing happened, all while fighting off the insufferable cravings for her own locks —because what she craves most is not the hair of a client, nor from extensions, but the hair grown from her own body.

Zel hears the gold-leafed bell on the door jingle, and when she turns around, Hannah is gone.

Today, Katelyn comes in for a haircut, which should be a cakewalk for Zel. As Zel works, Katelyn watches the goings-on in the mirror with mild interest while chatting away. Zel has just stepped back to cross-check the haircut for balance when her abdomen cramps and she doubles over in agony.

She is used to abdominal pain, but this is new, fresh, distinctive, a Bowie knife slicing into her intestines like through a cheap sausage.

She clutches at her abdomen as if to reach through and grasp her tearing bowels. A flash flood of sweat gushes from her pores, causing her freshly sharpened barber shears to slip from her fingers and to clatter to the floor. On the way down, the exposed blade catches the tip of Zel’s right forefinger and slices it off. The bit of meat from her injury lands next to the scissors, leaving a flesh-colored circle framed by checkerboard tile. Fresh blood from Zel’s wound rains red dots around it, completing her masterpiece.

“Would you please excuse me for a mome—” Zel drops to her knees, groping for her lacerated fingertip, smearing and squirting blood from her injured hand.

Seizing an opportunity, What’s Within shoots from her throat, lashing through the air like a whip in pursuit. It sniffs the floor and slurps up Katelyn’s blood-soaked hair clippings through its circular mouth. Finishing its snack, it lunges for Katelyn’s head with a screeching war cry, dragging Zel’s limp body along as it moves in on its next meal.

“What is that?” Katelyn yelps as she jumps out of the chair, ripping off the cutting cape and batting What’s Within away. Clipped hair from the cape puffs up in a cloud around her. Ravenous, What’s Within stretches its mouth open and swims through the cloud of hair, sucking up the strands the way a piranha swallows an unsuspecting guppy. It gurgles and moans, vibrating as it once again locks in on its prey. Before it can relaunch itself at Katelyn, Zel’s hands dart out and grips the prickly creature. She screams as barbed-wire-like skin rips through the flesh of her palms.

The creature convulses from its pure power, from its rage. Zel’s palms burn and she notices with some disdain that a nail has broken completely off. Again, she drops to the floor and drags herself, and the parasite, from the clinic to the break room. There, having calmed down considerably, What’s Within goes down for a snooze in Zel’s lap.

She peers out into the salon and, not surprisingly, Katelyn is gone. If Zel is lucky, Katelyn will head straight to her therapist and not the cops.

“Shit shit shit shit.” Zel cries salty, humiliated tears while hunched over in a chair, her head throbbing from the tightness of her ponytail. Her mascara runs gloopy, staining her cheeks and burning her eyes. She sucks on her injured finger and cringes at the metallic taste. Roused from its nap, What’s Within extends its tongue, gracing her exposed phalanx like a careless pet Dachshund licking a wound.

Balling a fistful of hair at the root, blood dripping and soaking her disheveled ponytail, Zel rummages through the picked-over first aid kit for rubbing alcohol, iodine, anything. She locates a lone disinfectant wipe at the bottom of the container and gingerly places it on the fresh injury. The chemical sting short-circuits her system, and her heartbeat drums from her forefinger. It’s all she can feel until What’s Within coils like a spring and leaps up and into her mouth, barreling down her throat like an overbearing metronome continuously out of sync.

Now, the dull throbbing pain deep inside her abdomen, the anticipation of the invader’s reentry that has ravaged her for half her life, is all she feels. What’s Within inches down her esophagus and settles back into her intestines. It has gotten so large that it now fills every inch of Zel’s digestive system and expands wall to wall, pricking like a magnolia seed. She can no longer swallow and her stomach grumbles as she feels What’s Within vibrating in hunger too. She wants to be in a field of poppies, alone, enjoying fruit salad and pinot grigio or fried chicken and a beer, ice cream sundaes topped with nuts and cherries, or… or really it doesn’t matter. Zel knows that in another timeline, another version of herself is free and light, enacting her vision scene by scene. If only she could be so lucky.

Instead, Zel is so backed up and is unable to keep anything down. Not even the six ounces of water she has attempted to guzzle to calm her dread. Solid or liquid meet the same end, an episode of vomiting. A confirmation her body can now only handle hair.

She wishes this wasn’t her life, that she could find another way to self-rectify trauma. She hates sucking on hair, chewing it, swallowing it in some sort of sensual but depraved act of self-love.

In middle school, when teachers or peers noticed Zel’s thinning hair and her habitual puking between classes, school authorities recommended an eating disorder recovery program and sent her home with pamphlets about the dangers of Bulimia. However, Zel’s parents, not firm believers in mental healthcare, balled up the literature and threw it away without as much as a second glance. In response, Zel locked herself away, outwardly projecting the perfect princess her parents always wanted.

She got by on her own hair for as long as possible before being forced to harvest elsewhere. This is how she discovered that the DNA in her own hair quickens the growth of What’s Within. Contrarily, DNA from the hair of others satiates it enough without giving it too much volition. This is why she is constantly beating back cravings to eat her own hair, the reason she spends thousands of dollars a year on hair extensions.

But without sustenance, Zel is growing weaker and it’s only a matter of time until her greatest fear plays out before her. She knows she can’t resist What’s Within much longer.

She sits scrunched in a corner by the back door, digging through the trash for a morsel to satiate What’s Within as she presses a wet paper towel to her injured finger. She has unearthed a dusty, sour-smelling ball of hair, amalgamations of clippings from the day’s clients: black curls tangled amid honey blonde waves. Zel hopes that once What’s Within receives the offering, it will settle down. At least long enough for Zel to catch her breath and establish a course of action.

Before ingesting the matted mass of hair, she sits, rallying her nerve and wondering if she’s been able to eat normally this whole time, if her inability to keep food down is truly a manifestation of an illness or a self-written fairy tale. Would it make a difference?

Regardless, she extends her tongue and gags as she pushes the coarse tuft down her tender, swollen throat. She whimpers as her stiletto-sharp acrylic nails slice through her esophagus, stretching the passageway to abnormal limits as her hand travels down her gullet. Her jaw unhinges with a piercing crack as her teeth are shoved loose to make way for her elbow.

This is how she has to do it, right? Like this, now or else: dead end.

She deposits the ball of hair deep in her gorge and extracts her hand. Her arm reeks of saliva and gastric juices. She inhales and, clenching her innards, forces the wad deeper, retching as a loogie squishes loose from her nasal passages while What’s Within consumes the hair. Zel feels What’s Within feed and her stomach releases a pang. Defeated, Zel slides down the wall and onto the floor. She lets the heat from her body fuse with the chill of the tiles. Her slack, dislocated jaw is excruciating and she’s in so much pain, she can’t discern from where. Still, she’s peaceful for the first time in years and allows herself to revel.

The dragon’s been slayed, her mother would say.

The sun is setting when Zel makes it to her feet and looks around the salon. The space feels liminal. As she cleans the dried-up blood from her station, she wonders how long she lay there in a daze, if any walk-ins came, if and when her boss would find out about anything that happened today. She retrieves her fingertip, and reattaches it with nail glue from her purse. She cleans the rest of the building —she’s closing early for the day, she decides —and settles the till the best she can. Katelyn, obviously, didn’t pay.

Afterward, she collapses into the receptionist’s chair, flush and dead tired. She wipes the sweaty glaze from her forehead and notices a sleek lacquer on the pale skin of her forearm, how the condensation creates dew drops on her peach fuzz. Looking closer, she notices a single strand of hair, twelve inches long and a deep amber. With some fascination, she realizes it’s a strand of her own hair, untreated, lustrous and perfect. She wants to discard it, flick it off like any loose hair, but instead draws it a little closer.

What’s Within bursts from her throat, spraying Zel’s blood and innards onto the cream-colored walls. Her teeth explode from her gums and scatter through the building like Pop-Its. Zel feels her insides warp as What’s Within consumes her singular hair. The forbidden delicacy. The blind creature’s mouth gapes, its forked tongue swishing in the air for the treasure it seeks, and finally comes to rest on Zel’s scalp. She’s weak. A damsel.

She falls to her knees and bows her head. What’s Within opens its jaw and descends upon Zel’s cranium, suctioning its mouth over her skull. As it sucks the life from her, she crawls to her station one last time. She grabs her shears, trying to hack at the creature or herself. But before she can decide, the parasite vacuums every last inch of hair, of scalp, of brain, Leaving Zel completely still, a skinned and unidentifiable corpse.

About the Author:
Ria Rowz-Elize is a hairdresser by day and hair-raiser by night. Now based in Maryland, she discovered and fine-tuned her creative voice in Philadelphia where she attended University of the Arts Creative Writing program —during which, her prose and poetry appeared in the university’s literary journal, Underground Pool. While her work has evolved from literary fiction to experimental speculative to whatever-the-hell-it-is-now, the common thread between her work has always been character-driven narratives that feature the absolute worst fates she can muster.