Tag Lock
An excerpt from my upcoming story collection "Bad Girls" about a woman who solicits hair from her online followers.
Tell me a story, she says. We’re sitting up in bed, the salt rock lamp bathing the room in a red glow. Okay, I say, closing my eyes.
I used to know this woman. Kat. She was attractive, had both FFS and a boob job. Her body tapered to a more feminine shape. It took her a few years, but she was getting her body to a place where she felt comfortable with herself. When she smiled her cheekbones popped. With makeup, she gave her face a sharp, almost feline quality. She practiced until she had a certain motion down pat: a shy, aw-shucks look where she’d point her face at them but kept her eyes downcast. The men ate it up.
She has a side business going. Fansly, OnlyFans, something like that. Candid photos where she wore just a collar and a set of floppy ears, tip of her nose painted black, posed on all fours. Her selfies propelled her follower count higher and higher. Soon men were flooding her DMs. So she struck up a system. She’d offer them a trade: a lock of their hair and she’d send them photos back in the mail. Simple enough, right? A PO Box in the next town over, a swap with someone she’d never meet and who never knew her real name. Easy peasy.
Takers were slow at first. Maybe they were skittish about giving out an address, maybe they found taking it offline was too weird. But some guys are that horny. A little snip here, a postage stamp there, and they’d have their very own set of wank material. The first day Kat found an envelope in her PO Box she couldn’t believe it. But soon another followed, then another. By the end of the month she’d gotten four parcels, and she sent back four photo sets in return. One day she laid them on her desk: a lock of jet-black hair, a lock of kinky hair, a lock of hair dyed blonde at the tip, and what looked like a bundle of pubic hair. Maybe she should’ve been more specific.
I opened my eyes, leaned over to the bedside table and took a sip of tea. Now, I continued, you might be wondering what someone does with a lock of hair. Why, spells of course. They call it a tag lock. Basically hair is a direct conduit from the witch to the recipient, a red telephone hotline direct from me to you. You can use this to send healing energy, bad vibes, and anything in between.
Kat had something specific in mind.
The first guy who sent his jet-black hair woke up one day feeling lightheaded. Faint. When he drove to work he’d gap out and miss his exit. Typos littered his emails. At first he thought he needed more coffee, maybe a vitamin B booster. But the attacks grew more frequent. One day he nodded off at a meeting. His boss sent him packing after that.
The second guy, the one who sent a lock of his kinky hair, realized one day at dinner that he felt weird. Edgy almost. He couldn’t put a finger on it but it was like he was always on his guard. Like someone was watching him. When he got ready for bed he’d lay awake and wonder if he remembered to lock his front door. When he left the lamp on in another room he could swear he saw shadows moving where they shouldn’t. Coffee mugs ended up in different places than he’d left them, plates of leftovers vanished from inside the fridge. Soon he couldn’t sleep. Something was there.
The man with the blonde tips knew of the other two, but only because they all followed Kat. He saw their posting getting erratic, but figured that maybe some people are just weird. He didn’t think much of it. But then it felt like their posts were about him. Not that they said anything specific, but he felt like they were obliquely mocking his own. And soon everyone else was too. As he scrolled along the timeline, more and more posters were putting him down, cattily mocking him without naming him. After a few days it ate away at him. At work he kept fretting about these assholes and how he’d DM them only to get blocked. After the third time his boss saw him playing with his phone, he was told to empty his desk and go home.
Finally, we come to pubes man. He thought he was funny. Sending that whore a bunch of his crotch clippings. Little whore deserved that kind of joke. He cracked up imagining her reaction. But then, it wasn’t like he did it just for her. He had them lying around his bathroom floor. Gotta keep it tidy and trim down there. He’d shave in the shower, lathering up his pelvic area with conditioner to get the closest, smoothest shave. Too bad he nicked his dick the one day. Hurt like a bitch, but accidents happen. He rinsed it off.
But maybe not enough. The nick was inflamed the next day, turning purple the next. It hurt when he put ointment on it and felt hot to the touch. When he noticed it oozing puss he decided he’d better go to the ER.
So did the kinky hair man. He hadn’t slept in days and felt like he’d been plugged into a lamp socket. Jittery at every step, wary that someone was following. Like that car just behind him. Why was he following him to the hospital?
Meanwhile, the first guy was exhausted. Even though he got eight hours a night he still felt like he hadn’t slept in days. He yawned at the stoplight, brushed his black hair out of his eyes. Maybe time to get another coffee.
Blonde tips was on the other side of the stoplights. Not that he knew it, though. He kept looking down at his phone, scrolling and posting, getting mad at the people who kept subtweeting him. It was an itch he kept scratching at but it grew more and more intense as he replied, the posts just grew more personal and cut deeper. He idled, eyes fixed on the screen.
As the kinky hair man sped towards a set of lights they flashed yellow. Now was a good way to find out if he was being followed: he’d speed through the red and see if the other driver did too. He punched the gas.
As the black hair guy yawned, the light turned green. He turned forward, never feeling the impact as a car slammed into his driver side door. A second before, blonde tips saw movement out of the corner of his eye and drove forward without checking. He rammed into the accident, making three cars spin in the middle of the intersection. The fourth car, the driver too distracted by his crotch, wasn’t paying attention as he hit the accident too, ramming into it at full speed. As the horns mingled in their blare, smoke rose from the wreckage.
And Kat? She felt great. Her breasts felt firmer, her eyes brighter. The hair beside her computer shriveled up and faded into dust. And as she swept it with one hand into the trash she wondered: would bottom surgery be this easy?