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

[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.