Every few days, a hair pokes up from the glossy surface of the hairline pimple she popped. It had crusted over like a manhole cover, then healed and left a slight, smooth curve. She pulls the hair with needle-nose tweezers, just as wrinkly as the first hair she pulled from this spot, but now gray. A woman of a certain age, she covers the gray with dark brown dye (Winter Mink) every six weeks, prays it is not so toxic it cancers her but also understands the cost of vanity. She collects these ramen-hairs in separate baggies, dates each one, puts them on a key ring in chronological order, keeps the key ring on a leather valet that belonged to her ex. She’d kept it because he loved it and he had been awful to her, starting soon after the vows, then desperate on the last day, squeezing her hand until it pulled her arm straight, nearly out of its socket. Horrid every day in between. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, her lawyer had said, take everything you want when you leave. She took the leather valet, the coffee table, all the flatware, and the dog. She also took the Christofle champagne opening set, the world’s most useless gift. There would be a reason for champagne someday. 

How do the hairs keep finding their way to that spot, she wonders—is there subdermal signage, a groove forming, like a chute? The body was truly a mystery. 

Soon it’s been a month that she’s been pulling out hairs, each one infinitesimally thicker than the last. A month like any other, some improvement at dance (she does Upbeat Anthems classes) and of mood. Called her brother but couldn’t say why when he answered, once left groceries in the trunk overnight (the yogurt!), walked into rooms and out again, having forgotten why she entered. Was a pinch late to meetings, foggy on the names of people at the dog park, but knew the names of the dogs (she was not in the habit of cataloging the names of people she doesn’t like). At fifty, it’s a bit early for senior moments, but then again, time and aging are natural, random forces, no more subject to wishful thinking than earthquakes or being born into the wrong family. 

She does her nightly checks of the house before going to sleep. The front door locked, back door locked, interior garage door, side window, dining room sliding glass door, locked, locked, locked. The big closet behind the crook of the hallway, clear, no one hiding in it. Opened the water heater closet and eyeballed the joints of the tubes, though who even knew what to look for. Houses swarmed with potential catastrophe: heating elements, the dryer vent, the crawl space. Leaks, lint, spores. The way the furnace whooshed on sounded like an explosion about to happen. She checks the carbon reader, the stove top dials. The inside is safe. Outside, the yard looked empty and the street quiet, though there was the simmering danger of the modern environment: carcinogenic lawn chemicals, forever chemicals, salmon beaded with microplastics. She carries pepper spray because of bus stop assaults, avoids salons because of salon shootings, and subways because people shove other people onto the tracks. She walks in a bubble of situational awareness, her head on swivel, doing her best in a world where one’s best is almost irrelevant. 

Last, she kneels to open a bottom dresser drawer to check on her hidden treasures. Even privately, she cringes at the term, but it popped into her head one day and stuck—the possessions she keeps hidden despite living alone, things she didn’t want anyone (her mother, her sister, her dog sitter) to find and help themselves to: a childhood stuffed mouse, a picture of her first dog, a Valentine she sent herself, a designer bracelet, and a rubber-banded log of emergency cash, all double-bagged and stuffed into two consecutive socks. Does a quick finger count of the objects, re-socks them.

The day she pulls a particularly long ramen-hair, almost three feet, she marvels before bagging it. Later, forgets to walk the dog before dinner, and worse, when she goes to make up for her mistake at sunset, she doesn’t remember the dog’s name, standing at the door holding the limp leash, calling, Jack? Frisbee? Peaches? The dog comes running at the jangle of the leash, takes what she assumes is its usual route. She realizes, pausing to let the dog pause and sniff, wag its tail at the approach of a friend-dog, that she hasn’t taken her medication in a few days, yet she feels calm. Unflappable. She tends to flap. But not today.  

A quick sizzle of worry, a close consideration of the key ring of ramen-hair in baggies, turning them over like leaves in a book. She could use a second key ring. Should she have been more concerned? She should have been, but you don’t know what you don’t know. The next day she goes to the toy store, buys a beginner microscope, examines a hair-hair freshly pulled from her head and a ramen-hair from a baggie. The ramen is definitely not hair. She looks up “brain tissue electron microscope” on her phone and finds images similar to what she saw under the scope. A school of jellyfish, a cluster of pink paisleys criss-crossed with a spider’s webbing. What has she done. The dog noses the baggies and she shoos it away. What has she done. 

Do not, she threatens herself, pull any more hairs. 

A week goes by, the plumber comes out to flush the water heater, the HVAC guy to suck out the lint in the exhaust tube of the dryer. Her neighbor stops to ask, how often do you do that. Every two years, she and the HVAC guy said in unison. We’ve never done that, her neighbor says, and she eyeballs the distance between their houses. She walks the dog, takes her supplements, doesn’t even look at the glossy nib where the ramen-hair sometimes pokes out, rather, concentrates her body examination on her neck, armpits, breast perimeters, and writes in her journal, NNB. No new bumps. 

Weeks later another filament noses up from the nib, a gray needle tip in a sea of mink-brown hair. With great resolve, she snips the quarter inch with manicure scissors instead of pulling it, feeling as though there’s been a minor theft. The bit she cut sits in her palm, fine as a splinter. 

Well. Hm. 

What if she did pull them, but went about it with her father’s surgical precision. He owned a corner store but unofficially he did a lot of home surgery, used a proper surgical drape, a brown glass bottle of peroxide and a thrifted scalpel. He had no tact, pulling down people’s collars to get a better look at a mole or cyst and offer his services, and no one had ever complained about the results. To him, the body was a willing host and the skin a constant traitor. (His friends had escaped across the DMZ as children only to be felled by melanomas in Fresno; if he saw a weird mole, he was going to remove it.) He kept what he cut in small baby food jars, meticulously labeled, ladybug-sized plugs of flesh floating in solution. He organized all information, loved a visual history. She could do it.  

Another visit to the computer, to look at brain anatomy: avoid the front lobes that control motor function and language, higher cognition. The lobes where memories live were towards the back, above the nape of her neck. A test run: her birthday, an angry man, You happy, I didn’t forget, browned petals scattering, swallowing the hard marble of her disappointment, trying to resist the labor of putting on a crooked smile, but finally, finally, the squeak of protest, the smashing of tender secrets and ringing of hot bells.

She massages the back of her head for the length of a sitcom episode until a tip pokes up at the nib. She pulls. The ramen-hair slides out as if greased, a good fourteen inches, at least. She bags and labels it, showers, applies her creams, gets into bed at angles (head raised, back reclined, belly down, knees up, GERD and restless leg friendly). In the morning his name materializes without a pang and without a clear face, no halo of resentment or even emotional recall, really. Her mind noses around but the real estate of those years feels dull and rubbery, like anesthetized cheeks at the dentist. 

The thrill of the discovery flares in her like an emergency, colliding with her customary restraint. Adrenaline squirts out of her glands into her bloodstream, into her fingers. 

She will pull it all out. 

*

Over the next few nights, a surprising number of candidates appear for pruning: her uncle cheating at board games when she was a child, blaming her to the other adults. A clot of dollar bills in her sister’s hand, the ceramic hedgehog cracked in half, mother siding with the thief. Sitting like a hot nail at the table as she’s handed a plate with different and less food than the others without a word of explanation. In each, no one else seems to notice what is happening to her, they are present in the room but move through the vapor of her presence. She pulls carefully, only one per night, and soon the scrubby patch of those years is cleared and salted, her spirit freshly weeded. Emboldened, she tries for a more recent one: the man who follows her sometimes when she is out with the dog, at a distance but close (and for long enough) that she detours into the shopping center, to appear as if window shopping until he leaves and she can take another route home. He’s lurked four times in the last month, she recognizes him now, feels a tightening in her neck and back when she sees a man in her peripheral vision. 

Massage, find, pull. 

Some nights, tired, she pulls whatever’s there, a respectable length, throws it into the bin instead of bagging it. The bin of history, she thinks, the bin of ramen, and falls asleep without checking for new bumps.

*

It’s not a perfect science, the brain has its secrets. There are security codes in there, timetables of medicines, the location of hidden treasures. She writes it all down in a password-protected note on her phone, bloats her calendar with recurring events: groceries, prescriptions, bills due, seasonal home maintenance. Changes the filters on various vents but labels them with dates written on painter’s tape, calls the arborist for seasonal pruning and asks him to put her on an automatic schedule, the same for the guy who sprays for silverfish. Undertakes monthly visits to the nursing home and the cemetery, usually on the same day, one parent and then the other. Designs her environment for habit: house keys on a brightly colored hook, pills in a pillbox with a timer. 

Will it work on the dog, she wonders, calls to her, massages the dog’s head, locates a telltale hairline ridge, works it towards the front of the skull, makes a tiny hole with a needle, and pulls out a quarter-inch, calibrated for the dog’s walnut-sized brain. That night, for once, the dog eats a bowl of kibble not only without complaint, but with gratitude, looking up at her between bites. She hoots with success, empties the dog’s water bowl, scrubs it, leaves it to dry. On walks, the dog knows what to do, where to go, the new bone-shaped tag on her collar has the name Pucky Two engraved on it. Somewhere there was a memory of Pucky One, walking towards her on brittle, unbent legs, the last days of a long decline. She finds that fiber and pulls. Activates the security system at night, touches the photo of her grandmother next to the keypad, cuts the lights as she makes her way to the bedroom. One morning, to her horror, the side door to the house is unlocked and she feels the undeserved relief of having escaped a home invasion.  

Lock this! she writes on a piece of painter’s tape, and sticks it above the knob. 

A close call. She wouldn’t mention it to her father.

As with all trial-and-error, the pull sometimes lands one or two degrees in error. She pulled out her uncle’s game night bullying, but also his allergy to fruits with bromelain and oops! Luckily it wasn’t anaphylactic. Her palpating improves, of course, and soon she is able to pull just the part of a conversation where a friend said that one thing that was a touch objectionable. When she catches herself ruminating on an old thing to the point of freshly hurt feelings, she sits quietly and rubs her skull, looking for the fiber around the back of an ear or three fingers from her temple, nudges it up and over the crown of her head. Like a perfect machine, peristaltic movement scoots it along, and soon the tip comes out. (A measured, patient pull and voila! Like snaking a tiny drain.)

Strangely, without the weight of her active denial, many, many unpleasant memories bubble up. They are free to move, she guesses, and they do, right into her prefrontal cortex. She pulls out disappointing milestones (her thirty-fifth, fortieth, and fiftieth birthdays), obvious infidelities and lies, her mother’s sotto voce about her thighs, her waistline, her neck, all the times she overlooked a wildly offensive person to preserve the polite tenor of a meeting. The dressmaker’s weights of the accommodating person she once was, dropped, one by one. With every pull her face turns a bit more to the sky, her shoulders unfurl. The days feel blank, like short, pleasant journeys. She can sense the turning of the planet. She is less wary of other people.

The memories of her brother, the youngest, the only happy creature in her family, those she’d like to keep. He who sided with her against unjust teachers and fake friends, sometimes even their parents, despite being the golden child. Sure, he used to prank her by jumping out from corners, seizing her with terror every time, blood turning her fingers stiff with rage. He’d howl with laughter, even snap a picture of her face if he was quick enough. She told him, I don’t like that, to make him stop without exposing how vulnerable she was to that fear. It’s a joke, he said. The prank is easy to find, it practically pulsates under the scalp and she pulls it by what feels like the trunk, not the branches. Entire tubes in her brain cool, freshly plumbed. Her love for him feels unconditional again, her baby brother, an above-average thoughtful guy. 

She skips her nightly rounds some nights and lives to tell about it, she doesn’t burn one eye keeping it open while shampooing her hair, she sleeps in utter darkness for the first time in almost forty years. It’s not that she feels more safe exactly, but the pillowy indulgence of not feeling unsafe, an ambient sponginess, like a tube of unsweetened mallow fluff. What she has wanted all her life is to be less aware, less worried about freak accidents, or arbitrary unkindness, or nasty surprises. On most days the minutes unfold into one another and the hours advance in steady, pliable increments. Each act, each meal, each gesture surprises like the first time, every time. The satisfaction of folding a mess of laundry into neat cubes. Lying down when she wants to lie down. The sight of mail in the mailbox, every day, a little something, solicitations, flyers, sometimes a card from a friend in New Paltz, grocery circulars, catalogs, she reads it all. There is a sale on cotton candy grapes and also on Eames chairs. She is the quiet weightless peace of a balloon. Her phone is blessedly free of sudden, jarring messages Can you Do you When will you and pings mostly with reminders, “Vitamins” or “Water plants/fertilize.” The system works. “Cemetery visit” she canceled a few weeks ago, after she found herself standing there, gazing over rows of headstones, unsure what to do, who she’d come to see. 

She rubs the base of her skull at bedtime, hands in her smooth scalp, feeling around, though for what, she’s not entirely sure. Her ablutions take longer, she applies creams and serums to her cheeks, neck, eyes, to her décolletage. Her complexion flushes with newness, eyes bright, neck smooth, belly well curved from good eating. The enjoyment of looking at her entire body, the crooks and planes, the orbs and sacs. The tactile pleasure of crisp pajamas, which she puts in the dryer for a few minutes to warm, as a treat. She reorganizes her dresser drawers and finds two thousand dollars in a sock. Mornings are coffee on the patio, the occasional hummingbird in the yarrow she planted for bees. She sleeps in, leaves a bowl of kibble out for a neighborhood dog that comes over daily. It suns itself in the backyard, the dog is needy, friendly, always tries to go in the house and she must gently prod it back outside by the rump. It is their little game, she sits with it outside and strokes the warm belly until the dog snores. Her brother calls her now and they chat about amusing nothings. He says their father is doing well, painting and watching old movies, going for walks with an aide at the rehab facility. 

Ah, ah, she says, that’s great, as though she understands what he is talking about.

They said he tells jokes now, her brother says. 

Well he always did like a joke, she says. 

What? her brother says. 

*

Work is routine and easy, pleasant even, the bland chatter of innocuous people on little screens, repetitive processes, an assembly line for the mind. Click, click, upload, new window, close tab, thanks! The direct deposits are never late, the amount in her account grows by leaps and bounds. She wonders what people spend their money on. The grocery is full of delicacies she has never tried before. Buttery yellow bread, creamy Nordic yogurt flavored like lemons, like coffee, crispy chips flavored like yogurt. Her houseplants are thriving, the street is cleaned once a month by a truck with a giant spinning toothbrush, and no one ever drops by unannounced. It isn’t lonely because it is so safe.

One bright day she wanders into a store, sees a fruit named after dragons, a fruit called a mango. Mango, she mouths, mango mango mango. She takes bites of both as she walks up and down the aisles, leaves the rinds in between bottles of cold-pressed carrot juice. You can’t bring a dog in here, the voice dissolves behind her. She crunches from a bag of crackers supposedly made of chickpeas, horrible (insulting, actually), pulls a cup of rice pudding from a refrigerated shelf, peels back the lid, sets it on the floor for the dog. Thirsty, she cracks open a can of, unbelievable, ginger beer, takes a potent, spicy swig, walks through the bakery section, reaches into a glass closet for a donut, ma’am, you can’t just, walks out, pockets bulging with candy. The world is full of wonders that she can try by the mouthful, alone, in her sunny kitchen, or twirling in her quiet yard. She is full, warm, she is an atom floating, dancing, free.