String (short story)

Alfred was sitting on his bed, his neck half propped up against a quite unfortunately abused pillow, scrolling on his phone, when he felt a sudden itch in his nose.

Reactively, he reached his left hand up to scratch it, thinking it may have been a speck of dust or a gnat or just a random itch, only half speculating. 

With the itch resolved he lowered his hand. But then it came back, this time more immediate and much more irritating.

Alfred stood up quickly and reached for the box of tissues by his bedside. He blew his nose firmly, thinking that this would be the end of it, balled up the tissue, and then tossed it in the small, plastic wastebasket in the corner of the room.

As he turned to return to his bed, he looked down and noticed a piece of string—hanging right in front of him—hanging from none other than his left nostril. 

His stomach lurched in disgust, and he stopped, reaching up carefully to remove it. But as he began to pull the string, it only kept unraveling and unraveling—longer and longer, coming from deep inside his nasal cavity. 

Alfred was feeling a strange mix of terror and disgust as he kept pulling this mucus covered string from out of his nose, unsure if whether or not this would be his undoing. He pulled slowly on the string until some four feet’s worth of it hung in front of him with the end still not visible or noticeable in his nostril. 

Finally, after about six feet of string slid irritatingly through his nasal canal, he felt a lurch and felt a clump inside his upper airway attached to the piece of string. 

With disgust and panic he yanked the string hard with one pull and out of his nose came a little ball of paper, attached to the end of it. It landed in front of him on the floor. 

Alfred looked at this strange thing, then glanced around wondering whether this was a dream of some sort. No, this was waking life, he was sure of it. But what on earth was this string doing inside his nose and how had he not felt it before? He knelt down beside the balled up piece of paper attached to the string and examined it. It seemed to be some kind of little crumpled up note.

With disgust, he pried the mucus covered thing apart, a sense of dissociation coming over him at the strangeness of the situation, until it lay open in front of him.

It simply read this: “smell yuh later.”

Alfred sneezed, threw the note and string into the trash, and plopped back down on his bed to proceed to continue to scroll on his phone.