Coming to the Island
Soon after I arrived on the island, children in the backseats of SUVs began gesturing at the tail end of my car. I waved them on and kept the windows up, preserving the coolness, the smoke, the pulsing anticipatory thump of bass that led me forward to her through the misty night by rhythms through ground. When the traffic slowed, just as the signs had predicted it would, a bob-haired housewife waved franctially from her high driver’s seat perch. I flicked the switch and the glass that separated me from her voice disappeared.
THERE’S SOMETHING COMING OUT OF YOUR MUFFLAH, MISTA!
Although I’m sure my brow furrowed for a minute, I smiled and waved her on, still wondering if I’d heard right, and resumed my former posture.
When I finally stopped at an empty house a block from the seashore, I inspected the situation as my car cooled.
There it was. It ran five feet beyond the bumper when you straightened it all out, as it had become a little clumped and clotted with the sand, grease, and grit of a 100 mile jaunt down a dirty coastline. Maybe it’s your muffler lining. Sometimes that stuff has like fibers and stuff in it. But there it was, jet black, with long streaks of gray interspersed, a five foot ponytail of human hair that had undergone a natural—random—human graying process, been dragged wet along a bad stretch of interstate, and, by, hanging on to dear life to somewhere inside of my muffler, had lived to tell the tale. I spread out its cords in my fingers and inspected it. It was metallic? Maybe slightly synthetic. More like human hair after it’s spent the three straight months of mornings in chlorinated pools. But it was wet now, and when I bent it, it curled and it gave, still anchored somewhere near the heart of my car.
Well that’s a woman’s hair there alright! Now, how in the world… Do you suppose?... That a woman’s hair got stuck in there!? He turned, a perfect mix of certainty and confusion, to his wife, who could do little, in her drunken state, to ease his perplexity.
When I pulled it—hard (by this time I was bracing my thigh against my bumper and pushing off with my outside foot)—it finally gave from somewhere deep inside. It gave, haltingly at first before, conquered, yielding, it came in generous loops that I circled around my arm like in Boy Scouts.
For thirty minutes the locals eyed me with suspicion as I looped the growing, blackening strand around my arm and shoulder.
THERE’S SOMETHING COMING OUT OF YOUR MUFFLAH, MISTA!
Although I’m sure my brow furrowed for a minute, I smiled and waved her on, still wondering if I’d heard right, and resumed my former posture.
When I finally stopped at an empty house a block from the seashore, I inspected the situation as my car cooled.
There it was. It ran five feet beyond the bumper when you straightened it all out, as it had become a little clumped and clotted with the sand, grease, and grit of a 100 mile jaunt down a dirty coastline. Maybe it’s your muffler lining. Sometimes that stuff has like fibers and stuff in it. But there it was, jet black, with long streaks of gray interspersed, a five foot ponytail of human hair that had undergone a natural—random—human graying process, been dragged wet along a bad stretch of interstate, and, by, hanging on to dear life to somewhere inside of my muffler, had lived to tell the tale. I spread out its cords in my fingers and inspected it. It was metallic? Maybe slightly synthetic. More like human hair after it’s spent the three straight months of mornings in chlorinated pools. But it was wet now, and when I bent it, it curled and it gave, still anchored somewhere near the heart of my car.
Well that’s a woman’s hair there alright! Now, how in the world… Do you suppose?... That a woman’s hair got stuck in there!? He turned, a perfect mix of certainty and confusion, to his wife, who could do little, in her drunken state, to ease his perplexity.
When I pulled it—hard (by this time I was bracing my thigh against my bumper and pushing off with my outside foot)—it finally gave from somewhere deep inside. It gave, haltingly at first before, conquered, yielding, it came in generous loops that I circled around my arm like in Boy Scouts.
For thirty minutes the locals eyed me with suspicion as I looped the growing, blackening strand around my arm and shoulder.
posted by Michael Deuser at 1:11 AM
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