"In my dreams I'm less hairy," Peter told his friends Aki and Goldman.
Peter had recently been having dreams in which he was naked or topless for one of several reasons--sex, the beach, tattoo parlor, etc.--and it had been bothering him to notice when he looked down that there was a total lack of chest and stomach hair. He had also noticed that his belly didn't stick out as far, but this didn't annoy him so much as it actually delighted him. The hair, though... there was something disturbing about it not being there. Something unnatural.
Peter had begun to wonder whether this same thing ever happened to Robin Williams or to Indian people--anyone well-known for being hairy. Was the bearded lady beardless when she slumbered?
Peter himself was not particularly endowed with a full chest of hair, nor did he even enjoy the idea of having any hair at all besides the hair on the top of his head, but somehow it had disturbed him very deeply to look down in his dreams and see nothing but bare skin. He had developed a strange sense of pride about his body hair, in the same way that he felt strangely proud when he broke wind when nobody else was around and it smelled particularly bad. It was like a forbidden pride, something he knew he shouldn't be proud of, but there was some ineffable satisfaction in the whole idea of it.
"Less hairy," Aki repeated, half as an is-that-seriously-what-you-just-said question, half as an I’m-repeating-this-so-you-can-hear-how-dumb-you-sound remark. Laughing and trying to drink her beer at the same time, a drop of it fell down onto her chin and she turned her head to wipe it off with her shoulder.
Aki, being both female and half-Japanese, was certainly the least hairy of the three and couldn't remember any sort of dream in which hair was missing where it should have been. Nor could she remember any dream in which she had more hair than she should have, though she silently decided that would be far more disturbing than the former.
No comments:
Post a Comment