Thursday, January 26, 2006

Sucka

This afternoon at work I decided to finally eat the Christmas sucker I've been carrying around in my coat pocket for a month. This was a swirly sort of sucker made of two different colored candies, kind of like a candy cane, except it was strawberry flavored.

When I opened the plastic I noticed a hair. It was a long, dark brown, and somewhat wavy human hair. Ordinarily this would've nauseated me and I wouldn't have dared put the sucker in my mouth, but I was at work, where desparation invalidates all ordinary rules. I picked the hair up, and much to my horror, discovered it actually was embedded in the sucker. During the manufacturing process, the hair had gotten mixed up in the swirling candy, and now it went all the way though it. I could see the hair hanging out of both sides. So I did what any other desparate sucker-craving bastard would've done, I just yanked off both ends of the hair and popped the sucker in my mouth.

The sucker tasted quite good and it was surprisingly easy to forget that it had a hair going all the way through it. Periodically I'd take it out of my mouth and look for the hair. At first I didn't see it and hoped that I'd been wrong about it being embedded in the candy, but soon I saw it sprouting out of one side like it had grown there. I tugged it and it wouldn't budge. The sucker went back into my mouth.

I had no tweezers, so I couldn't do any kind of quasi-surgical follical removal, so I just put up with it. The hair was actually detectable by my tongue. I tried not to dwell on it, but I kept thinking about it. Oddly, it wasn't repulsive, it was weirdly fascinating. I really wanted to be able to successfully pull the hair out.

The sucker got smaller and smaller, then the stick came off. It was a plastic stick rather than one of the hard rolled up paper ones. It came out easily, but I didn't want it come out. How could I watch the progress of the hair without a stick? And then I accidently bit the sucker in two. After that I just gave up and sucked on it until the pieces basically just broke appart with the pressure of my tongue. I crunched the bits with my teeth and swallowed them. Afterwards I kept thinking the hair was stuck in the back of my throat and I had to fight the urge to start hacking like a cat bringing up a hairball.

I guess I just swallowed the hair. And for some reason, swallowing a quarter inch long piece of some candy-maker's hair doesn't bother me in the least.

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