Daily Prompt — Hairbrush

The hairbrush is the zombie on the dresser. The strands curl and twist in a parody of tresses, a Frankenstein arrangement, a once-living-now-dead-but-still-around mockery. The dust in the air clots on the filaments, attracted by the oily residue of life. Impossible to clean really. Tweezers, maybe, to pull out the fine hairs that have dug into the seams of the bristles, a pasty residue at the base. Tangles knotted around the soft bulbs at the ends that protect the scalp from scrapes. A corpse of follicles and skin, of threaded death and decay.

The old adage about brushing hair a hundred strokes a day to keep it shiny and healthy was all about the oils. People did not wash hair so often and women up until some time in the twentieth century wore their hair long. Long hair that was long dead, but kept looking healthy and alive with a steady pull of oil from the scalp down to the ends. Shiny. Nearly alive. But not living.

That hair is dead does not compute while it is on your head. It moves with the rest of the body. Nails too, as they pass the cuticle and become detached from flesh are also dead but we think of them as alive simply because touching the tip is felt by the living nervous system. But once detached, the strands and clippings, they reveal their essential deadness.

Maybe this is why black magic sought to cast curses and spells using the hair and nails of the victim. Undead magic reaching back to the still-living organism it came from. A resonance that could only decay and putrify the quick, never reanimate the severed parts. You cannot make a fresh living thing from dead parts.