The hair tangled up in the brush wasn't blonde, but coarse and black and thick. Not only were the strands the wrong colour but they were stiff with salt and crusty with, God, were those actually scabs? There was blood in the hair, too, I could feel it all of a sudden, dark and damp and sticky on my fingers. I suddenly had an image of a woman sitting at my dressing table, staring into my mirror and dragging my brush over her scalp over and over again, over and over and over, until the hair was all pulled out of her head and the bristles only dragged through bleeding flesh. And she would be laughing all the while, that sound that played and replayed in my nightmares.
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