Bearded Boy: Episode 3, The Un-naming

Bushy, bearded hair sprouts from the teeth seeds, twisting and tangling its way around the seat legs, winding its way up the metal sides, creeping across each and every window, and the Bus Driver waves his mighty hand to clear a patch on the windshield to see, but as soon as He clears away the hair, it grows right back again, and he screams in rage, and we cower in our seats as the gray sky is charcoaled and the windows turn pitch, and we wonder at our foolishness for ever thinking this world would last, and all the while the wiry hair spreads across the bus, weaving back and forth like the loom of a spider god, and when Jill attempts to cry out “How gross!” all that emerges from her mouth is a sputtering sound, as if she’s choking on some peanuts, and when Thomas attempts to cry, “It’s not fair!” all that sounds is a dry, wheezing, whistle, which surprises even him, but that’s not the least of it, for the bearded hair works its way through our backpacks and over our books until Allison herself looks up from her homework in horror, and we can see the pages of her history book are blank, and so each of us searches our packs, pulling out book after book, note after note scribbled to friends in class, and on every one of them the words have been erased, and that’s when Bob screams a scream we’d never want to hear again because it’s worse than the scream of the high school slut who gets stabbed by the slasher hiding beneath her parents’ bed while screwing the football quarterback in one of those movies, and we understand why he screams that way because we feel it, too, the horrible, hazy cloud of hair moving through our brains, pushing everything out until we no longer remember our own name, and if that’s not enough, the hair steals up our legs, winds about our arms, crawls over our heads, peeling back our limbs, expunging our faces, and still the school bus drives on.