November 20, 2012

it was by margaret atwood and it's in her book called 'wilderness tips' which I got for christmas last year and am only reading now because I'm busy, dammit. the story is called 'hairball' and it's gross and weird and I can't get it out of my head.

in the story the main character gets a huge ovarian cyst removed and it's got tons of red hair on it and little bones inside and some teeth poking out. it made me spend ten minutes google image searching cysts but never mind that. in the story she decides to keep it in a jar of formaldehyde on her mantle and through a series of events during the story she decides to send it to the wife of the guy she's been banging. she buys expensive chocolates and rolls the cyst in cocoa powder and wraps it up and mails it to the woman during a dinner party so she'll open it in front of her guests.

now I can't get the story or the image of a huge, hairy cyst out of my head. I've got a really morbid fascination with stuff like cysts and internal organs and stuff like that and it weirds me out that things can just decide to start growing inside of you for no good reason. and that they might have hair.



I think it's the hair that gets me. some gross ball of flesh or cartilage I can handle, but it's like when someone has a mole on their neck or their face and these huge hairs are protruding out of it and you're just like

pluck yr goddamn mole hair

and it's all you can stare at. that's how I was with these pictures on google image search of cysts being removed or in petrie dishes or on the side of someone's face. they all have hair on them.

when I was a kid I had a ganglion cyst on my right wrist and it used to bother me because even though it didn't have anything else growing out of it I was convinced people noticed it. I'd read somewhere that they were called "bible bumps" because you could smoosh out a ganglion cyst by slamming it with a huge book and back in the day the biggest book in a household was a bible.

turns out hitting yourself with any force isn't so easy, so I wound up pressing down using an old nancy drew hardcover book and I actually felt the ganglion cyst start to dissipate under my skin which was 100% hands-down the weirdest feeling ever. it was like dull electricity or sparkles or something silver-feeling dissipating inside of me.

recently someone I know got a cyst removed from their face, and in the short story I was reading the chick saved her cyst and I wonder if that's a thing. if you can save your cysts for keeps?

I don't think I could. I think if I brought my cyst home in a jar, especially if it had hair on it, I'd lose my mind staring at it trying to comprehend how it could grow inside me like that. so I guess it's a good thing I just smooshed my ganglion cyst when I was younger or I'd really have a complex.

this is by far the grossest thing I've written in a while.

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