Blue Tip Down

He awoke early, too early, yet had no idea why, but would soon find out. His head was itchy. Not just itchy, it was on fire. He dug his fingernails in deep and scratched. God it felt good, although it did nothing but offer temporary relief. 

Dave Driver felt like he was in a living hell. Even as he sat down in front of the TV with his morning cup of coffee, his attention was fixated on his head.  It felt like a thousand ants were crawling around in his scalp.

Being his day off, he decided to numb the pain with a rather large glass of whiskey, and then another. Eventually the discomfort seemed to ebb away.
He woke several hours later but felt much worse. The itch on his head had spread to his eyes. He rubbed them until they were as red as stop signs, and still they stung and burned.

Dave made his way to his bathroom to splash cool water onto his face. The relief was only temporary and the discomfort quickly returned. Only this time the tingling, itching, fire-laden feeling had spread to his nose and ears as well. He could hear a scraping-crawling sound. The volume was excruciating, but no matter how hard he held his hands to his ears, it only increased. Staring bleary-eyed into the mirror, he stepped away from the sink and immediately passed out.

He couldn’t tell if it had been minutes, hours or days since he had fallen, but one thing was evident to him – he was completely blind. He gingerly touched his eyes. The sockets were encased in clumps of matted hair. As Dave screamed in repulsion, he realized the sound was muffled. Had he hit his head when he fell? He reached for his ears only to feel long, thick hairs protruding from his auditory canals. Still on his knees, there was a wretched gagging sensation crawling down his throat. His body convulsed, tried to vomit up the intrusion, but the bile and contents of his stomach were stuck fast behind an impenetrable wall of hair that was working its way down his throat.

After what seemed like an eternity of writhing and spasming in pure agony, he died.

***

Dr. Sadler didn’t hear the door open as the two police officers entered the room followed by two other doctors from the facility. As they shook him awake, they were repelled by the stench of alcohol that enveloped him. He stared at them with upside-down eyes, then proceeded to vomit all over the lead investigator’s shoes.

Sometime later, after he had sobered up enough to sit upright, the interview began.

The detectives laid out the facts of Mr. Driver’s sad demise. They then inquired about the procedure Dr. Sadler had performed the day before wanting to know every minute detail of the patient’s hair transplant.

Dr. Sadler cleared his throat and then confidently informed them that he had inserted each of the genetically modified hairs with the utmost precision, and applied the growth agent at the required dosage of 1ml per square inch of scalp. He proudly announced that he had managed to give Mr. Driver double the number of hairs per square inch than most of his co-workers had the skill to deliver.

This new genetically modified hair was even better than the older version, his arrogance proclaimed with a belch.

“Blue tip down, white tip up,” he boasted. “And then the patient will never be blue, or down again,” Drunken laughter punctuated his statement.

Dr. Marigold, one of Sadler’s co-workers who had sat in on the interview, put his hands to his mouth and gasped. “It’s blue tip up on the new hair, and 0.1ml of solution. Please tell me you didn’t…”

Dr. Sadler’s shoulders slumped and his body fell forward, his head made an audible thump as it hit the table; he’d fallen into a drunken stupor, again. 

***

Mrs. Driver put down the flowers that she has brought along to adorn her husband’s grave. She gently laid them on the thick thatch of dark hair that continued to push its way up through the oak coffin and six feet of earth. She had heard the churchyard gardeners mumble and groan as she passed them. Apparently, they were sick and tired of having to mow the Driver plot twice a week, when the surrounding grass only needed doing once or twice a month at most.

∼ Ian Sputnik

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