A Hairy Fairy-Tale

An allegory of otherness.

Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash

She had been an early bloomer. Puberty had hit her hard and fast, and while her girlfriends at school had remained flat-chested and hairless like Sphinx cats, she had grown tall, buxom, and hirsute as soon as she’d hit ten years old.

Thick, coarse hair sprouted from her arms and armpits, her legs, and her pubis, a dense thicket of black knot-weed that emerged…