Diary of My Leg Hair

Photo by hybridnighthawk on Unsplash

At first, I believed it was an intrusion — the dark, prickly hairs emerging from a landscape of undifferentiated pores.

There was no one to consult. My parents were at work, like always, leaving me alone in the house. To pass the time, I pressed my leg hair between my fingers. I gnawed on it like grass; I teased it, combed it, tried to impose some sort of order on what was otherwise a wilderness. When the light was at its strongest, I plucked a single hair and watched its edges glow a deep red.

Where did you come from?

Why are you here?

I speak to my leg hair as I would speak to myself. Which is to say: with suspicion. Which is to say: with one ear trained to the sounds of a door opening and closing.

I used to play with a boy who was one year older than me. He liked to stick ants in my orifices. He made up a points system: two points for ears, three for nostrils — four if he got both at the same time — five for mouth. Asshole was ten points, the top prize. We played next to the square of preserved marshland that separated our two housing units. The entire area used to be a marsh, or so I had been told when our family moved here. Now there was the creek and this square, both of which were owned by the development company. Runoff from the local reservoir kept the earth muddy and teeming with life year-round.

An ant can carry up to twenty times its own body weight. Most humans can barely carry a third. Pretty pathetic, huh? Ants definitely have us beat. That’s why I like to call this game “survival of the fittest.”

Hold still.

Normally the ants would have been rolled into slick undifferentiated balls between my friend’s fingers, but from time to time he would manage to coerce one onto a leaf or a twig, and so when it finally reached me I could feel the legs twitching, the tiny body spasming and contorting against the encroaching darkness. I never screamed. I just dug my nails into the earth, shut my eyes, and prayed that the ant would find its way out of those uninhabitable caves. Don’t you understand, I would think, picturing the models of ant colonies I had seen in museums, the delicate network of interlocking veins and somber, diamond-shaped rooms — there is no place for you here. Please leave while you still have the chance.

I never told anyone about this game. I would lie awake at night, wrapped as tightly as possible in the sheets, shaking violently whenever I thought I felt a pinprick of movement, the whisper of tiny legs making its way up my body. I would hear my friend’s voice in the dark: Holdstillholdstillholdstill.

My parents have been saying that we won’t be here for much longer. Soon we’ll move into an even bigger house, with plenty of space to run around and play. As soon as my mother gets home from work, I crawl out of bed and listen to her going over the details on the phone, training herself to speak the way all her friends and coworkers speak. My father stands behind her, one hand on her back. Sometimes he moves