Tuesday mornings meant grooming. Preening, tweezing, primping, pulling, tucking. Every Tuesday since she was old enough to care, or, what's more likely, old enough for it to matter. She'd always start with an inventory of sorts. A long gaze into the bathroom mirror. The translucent hair just above her upper lip. The mole just underneath her jawbone on the left side of her neck. Her trimmed and tweezed eyebrows. Her thin eyelashes. Her grey eyes. Her permanently pouted lips and always-flushed cheeks. The small scar that only she could see just above her right temple. Nothing spectacular. The same reflection she'd seen yesterday and the day before that. The same she'd see tomorrow. By all accounts she was pretty. Not to be envied or lusted after, but not to be ashamed of or hidden either. Better than average, but just. She was used to it, to herself.

The scalding water exploded her pores, soaking in the heat, pushing the salt, grit, sleep from her skin. Her face buried in the blue, plush towel, she'd breathe the steam. And she'd return to her reflection. With polished, stainless steel tweezers in hand, she'd comb her eyebrows flat. Then against the grain. And flat again. She'd start from the outside and work her way toward the center. Pluck the rogue hairs just abover her eyelids, the overgrown hairs cresting at the innermost point of her brows. Make bald the space inbetween. Fifteen, twenty, thirty pulls, each leaving behind a small, flushed dot. Most wouldn't notice just how much work she put in, just how much time. But she knew.

Between her index finger and thumb, she claspsed the tweezers's edges around a just-sprouted hair in the very center of her eyebrows. It was dark and a bit thicker than the few she'd plucked around it. With a firm hold, just like all the others before it, she tightened the muscles stretching from her fingers across the top her hand to her forearm and tugged. She felt the hair loosen from the skin holding it in place, the root dislodge and spring free.

But the hair was still there, right where it had been.

She tugged again, and again felt the hair loosen, but still there was no hair between the tweezers's teeth. Again, nothing. Scraping, scratching, with no success. Frustrated, with both hands clamped firmly around the tweezers, the tweezers secured around the hair, she pulled -- and the hair extended. As if growing, right then and there. That milimeter folicle became a two-inch-long hair, a thread sprouting from the very center of her head. Clenched between her fingers, she pulled again, furious and disgusted. Five inches. Ten inches. Hand-over-hand, she continued to pull the hair from her head like a magician pulls an endless-scarf from his sleeve.

Her tear-streaked cheeks reflected the incandescent bulbs above her. Her back against the wall, the tile floor cold on her bare thighs. Her hands raw, her palms sliced by that single hair spooled around her. Coiled like a snake, hundreds of feet long and still attached right at the center of her head. Each new foot wet with blood. With each new foot, a piece of her body unraveled. Her feet and legs unwinding like a ball of yarn. She continued to tug. Her hips, her stomach, her chest unspooling like the thread off a sewing machine. She continued to pull. Her fingers loosened, spread apart, and broke into threads, one thread, that thread. She continued to pluck, using her mouth now. Pulling her very self apart. And with one last pull, one last clench of her jaw, tightening her lips, she unraveled.

A pile of thread. A pile of herself. Plucked apart.