Work Text:
It starts with a strand of hair in your bathroom sink.
It’s long, fine, and blonde—all qualities which your own distinctly lacks. You live alone, with no roommates, no visitors. You can’t seem to recall anyone in your life to whom this hair could belong, and you just shrug it off.
But they keep turning up.
On your shitty scavenged futon, across the kitchen counters, on the inside of your jacket. At some point, you’ve stopped throwing them away and started keeping them all in a little ziploc bag.
The strands have turned into a veritable clump by the end of the first week. This should concern you, but between your night shifts as a warehouse security guard and dragging yourself to the convenience store before coming home after shifts, you don’t have much time or energy to dedicate towards unraveling this mystery.
Besides, it’s just hair—until it’s not.
The teeth throw you for a loop, for sure. They’re whole adult teeth, pearly white and slightly translucent. You find them along the baseboards, almost inconspicuously placed. You talk to your landlord about changing locks, and leave it at that.
Another week passes, and the hair is gone. It’s just teeth now.
They go in another bag next to the hair in a kitchen drawer. Most people would be scrutinizing the neighbors for signs of potential serial killers at this point, but you honestly do not have the energy to feel anything besides a vague sense of uneasiness. You’re on double shifts now, and it’s just about all you can do to drag yourself home and pass out on the futon each morning.
By the end of the next week, there’s nothing new. You begin to think that whoever, or whatever has been leaving you these gifts has stopped for the lack of a reaction. You aren’t one to be driven from your home by something like this.
That is, until something goes wrong with the pipes.
The morning you go to brush your teeth before going to bed, the tap runs red. And it stinks. The stench of iron is enough to make you gag, before you wrench the faucet handle shut and stumble out the door for your landlord.
The plumber, who tracks mud across your linoleum with his stained boots, quirks a brow when he turns it back on to a stream of clear tap water. He tells you it must have been residual rust, and claps a hand on your shoulder, telling you to get some more rest.
As you’re sprawled across the futon in a state between awake and asleep, you feel the whisper-fine sensation of hair brushing across your skin.
You can’t sleep much these days, anyway. In your fits of restlessness, you think you see a mangled body in the corners of your vision. A large, writhing mass of pale flesh—limbs broken and twisted, bursting apart at the seams like overripe fruit.
You’ve never killed anyone, but you feel your hands around the throbbing neck every time you reach for your alarm.
Your supervisor has a conversation with you about sleeping on the job. The teeth and hair are not in your drawer all the time. This morning, you open it and find an eyeball. The iris is a milky blue, and the fleshy pink of the optic nerve swings gently as you dangle it from two fingers.
It’s someone, you think. Someone who’s appearing in your life, one piece at a time. You laugh to yourself as you rinse the blood from your teeth.
You think you hear it whisper to you at night, wrap an arm around your collarbone— my friend, my enemy.
But the broken corpse is only the white against the back of your eyelids. At dusk, you peel the sheets from your skin and the brisk chill of the evening air clears the haze from your lungs.
Your lease is up in another four months, and maybe there will be hair in your sink, or maybe there won’t.