Story fragment idea

[pegkerr]

Playing (i.e.; don't think I would write this; just toying with the idea):

"The Bone Comb."

A woman receives a comb made of bone (a legacy from an eccentric aunt who never married? found in a junk shop?) Attached to it is an elegantly handwritten note: "Do not use unless you are prepared to live with the consequences."

She uses the comb and is startled to discover that her hair starts falling out. Soon she is completely bald. She is angry at first, but then thinks about the note. Some assume she is going through chemotherapy. Some think she has alopecia. She tries going bald to work. Her husband's reaction? Does he reject her? She embraces the baldness, buys a tough-girl leather jacket. The leather jacket makes her feel like a completely different person; she experiments with going places she would never have thought to have gone before. More consequences follow this. She starts treating her identity as more malleable than she has ever done before.

Where does this story go? Does she encounter her inner artist, becoming a photographer, just as her eccentric aunt was a potter?

Comments

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

I'm seeing this as more of a grim fairy tale - she adapts to the hair loss by changing personas, and as such finds eventually that her husband or boyfriend and/or children suddenly can't relate to her any more, they leave her, she ends up alone, finds out why the aunt was alone all these years.

But does it end happily, with a new guy, finding out her husband was all wrong for her and left her for his secretary which he would have done eventually, or does it end with her wandering into the sea, like in The Awakening, punishment for not keeping to her place and following instructions like a good girl, giving in to curiosity? Like Eve biting the apple, Pandora opening the box, Bluebeard's wife making the wrong decision about the key and the door.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I think in order for that to work, her husband has to have married her for her hair.

Maybe she should start losing other things after that. Hair is so superficial. Maybe she loses personality traits?

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

I disagree, you missed my point - her hair is just a symbol. She feels different without her hair, and so her personality changes. Her personality change is what drives him away.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Hmm. What if her personality changes and she walks away from HIM?

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

A different morality play, but equally as possible!

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

Actually, this sounds not entirely unlike Bohumil Hrabal's rather good novella 'Postriziny', or 'Cutting it Short', which is about a girl in the 1920s who chops her magnificent Art Nouveau curls short into a shining bob.

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

The whole story's been done before, really - woman receives forbidden object, uses against instructions, suffers dire consequences, yadda yadda yadda. In this case it happens to be hair loss, which, OK, you can buy a wig and live with it, unless there's more story to tell :-D

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

My mother lost all her hair (although, after a course of treatment it has since come back - white, now, rather than red, but at least it's there) and a few years ago, out of the blue, I lost maybe 2/3 of mine (although it's now back to being pretty much normal, if not as astonishingly thick as it was when I was younger), and fwiw I think that it's surprising how much of a sense of self is shaped by something as trivial-seeming as one's hair. Going from normal to bald overnight - I think that 'superficial' doesn't do justice to the visceral impact that hair loss has.

It's an interesting idea for a story, imho.