It’s funny how your hair seems to grow in spurts isn’t it? You can go for weeks and it seems the same and then one day something changes when you’re not looking. It was one of those days when I realised that something wasn’t quite right and I felt a little rough.
In the turbulent blackness of the bedroom where I stood on the splintering floorboards my brittle hair kept blowing in front of my eyes. I needed to be able to see the horrors coming at me so I tried to get a hold of it but as I did so, my hands tore it away in clumps and I saw that they had turned a brittle grey. I bunched the swirling folds of my nightgown around my thighs so that nothing would creep up past my knees and I wished that my feet weren’t bare because then I wouldn’t have seen my toenails curling into yellow crusty talons. My mouth had been open but to stop the decay spreading, I clamped it shut and my teeth started to crumble. I spat the contents venomously onto the eiderdown repeatedly until my mouth was empty and my gums were shrunken and dry. Who were these creatures slithering from the shadows in the corners of the room and bellowing a foul stench of unintelligible curses at me? How could I deal with them in my deteriorating state?
But it wasn’t all bad. My younger self had fled not towards these demons but from them. My worst nightmares were about to be surprised. I had to let go of my nightgown but it was a small sacrifice. As I rose into the wind, I grabbed the wooden bedpost (the drapes had been torn away in the gale) and I flew at them.
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