This time around, Fern devotes particular attention to the hair under your nose. A sadist at the clinic—and really, it’s hard to imagine anyone else working there—would relish the opportunity to blast heat at the upper lip, site of the toughest hair and the most sensitive skin, a sensuous and erogenous spot, of taste and smell and touch.
It feels hot and sharp, like someone is holding a lighter under your nose. It is intimate, the close examination, the awkwardness, the early-morning sniffles.
It is a quiet part of your routine, for now, one which you hope will beget a new routine entirely. Every four weeks, on a Friday, at 8 a.m., you go to a place halfway between a dentist’s surgery and a tanning salon to get laser beams blasted at you.
A face is cleansed in the same way a lawn is mowed: over and back, systematically, like it is terrain rather than identity, place rather than person. You fancy yourself as a place, one in the grip of a kind of revolution, where the natives are restless and the rulers’ fists no longer iron but mere flesh and bone.
Then, after seven to twelve minutes, it is done, and there are raised red bumps where your old self used to be. This is normal, Fern says, and you are booked in for the following month, subject to the follicular cycle you vaguely remember from biology class. The hair chooses its own time to die; all you can do is respect it.
Fern is peroxide-blonde and lives with a fiancé in Kildare somewhere. She asks if you are doing anything for the weekend, as if it isn’t obvious by you taking the Friday-morning graveyard slot that you are not.
Yes, Fern, I’m going to be applying aloe vera at nightclubs and sex dungeons through the greater Dublin area, because I am a fun person and not a gremlin vacillating between personhoods like a rickety bridge.
Thank you, Fern, see you soon, Fern, have a lovely weekend, Fern.
The full story is published as part of the Be Gay, Do Crime anthology by Dzanc Books.
Soula Emmanuel 