This story is a response to the Muse on Monday prompt from September 7, 2026: Write a story about a character with a prosthetic body part.

Low Brow, No Brow

I woke up with my ears still ringing. The last thing I remembered was laughing as I tossed that bundle of firecrackers into the bonfire. While holding the open container of gasoline, for some reason. It had been quite a bar mitzvah.

A doctor came into the room, looking serious. “Mr. Kurtz, I have some bad news.”

I looked down and wiggled my toes. Okay, it couldn’t be that bad.

“You have no eyebrows,” he said. “The explosion you caused completely burned them off.”

“What about my eyelashes?” I asked, forgetting I could check for myself.

“They’re fine,” he said. Everyone had laughed at me for wearing that asbestos mascara. Who’s laughing now? I thought smugly.

“Your hair is okay too,” he continued. “Apparently you were wearing an asbestos baseball cap?”

“Hey, when you’re heir to the Kurtz asbestos empire, it comes with the territory,” I said with a smirk.

“We’ll talk about how stupid that is later,” he said. “For now, let’s get back to your eyebrows.”

“They’ll grow back, right?” I asked.

“Normally, yes. However, the firecrackers you exploded were made on the black market and contained a chemical called NEB-9. It’s banned in 225 countries—”

“Are there even that many countries?”

“Many countries banned it twice, it’s so dangerous. Unfortunately, it has destroyed the follicles of your eyebrows. They’ll never grow again.”

I tried to raise my eyebrows in shock, but nothing happened. I almost wept.

“What now?” I whispered. Sadly, I mentally erased raise one eyebrow at a time off my bucket list. Dust in the wind, I thought.

“In the past you would be a social outcast for the rest of your life,” the doctor said, “but modern medicine has come a long way. We can give you cybernetic eyebrows. The best ones are Wi-Fi enabled and have the latest cybersecurity features.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Not if you want someone hacking your eyebrows,” the doctor said, furrowing his brows in a way I could only dream of in my current situation. “Do you want some cyber criminal making you look skeptical when your girlfriend tells you a deep secret? That could ruin your life.”

Of course I didn’t. He’d convinced me.

The insurance wouldn’t pay for the one with cybersecurity, of course, and the cheapest version was just a pair of steel wool pads and a bottle of superglue. But there was a promotion with Google’s trademark GoogleBrow that I could take advantage of. I just signed in with my Gmail and hit accept on the ten pages of releases and that was it. There was even a GoogleBrow app where I could manage the updates and change the color if I wanted to. I didn’t want to look like a weirdo who kept changing the color of his eyebrows, so I just left them on green.

“Hey, what do you think?” I asked my friend Mark when I saw him next. I waggled my new cybernetic eyebrows at him.

“Wow, they’re great! So realistic.” Mark had been standing next to me when I chucked the firecrackers into the fire. He had shielded his eyes, but his beard had been completely burned away. He was considering Meta’s new FaceBeard, but his girlfriend was against it since she’d always wanted him to be cleanshaven.

Mark looked a bit closer. “Looks like they’re kind of messed up.”

I reached up to smooth them down, but the eyebrow hairs remained all over the place. I grabbed a mirror and saw that the hairs of my left eyebrow spelled out T-Mobile. The right one said Liberty Mutual.

“Oh, man,” Mark said, “your eyebrows are showing ads. The FaceBeard spies on you 24/7 but nothing this bad.”

“I don’t want ads!” I shouted. “Can I skip them?” I opened the app. I found a feature where I could customize the ads to the person looking at you, but that was it.

In desperation I read the releases I’d signed. It was pretty shocking. On top of allowing Google to show ads on my eyebrows for the rest of my life, I’d also agreed to be placed in a transparent Snow White-esque coffin after I died so people could keep seeing the ads.

I knew I couldn’t fight the Man (especially since I had agreed in Section 8 of the release that neither I nor any of my descendants would ever fight the Man). However, I wasn’t about to walk around letting everyone know about the new iPhone 22 either. I went out and bought a sweatband which I wear all the time now. I’m still looking for formal version to wear with a suit if that situation ever arises.

I’ve thought about my mistakes in this whole debacle, and I feel like the lesson here is pretty clear. I would urge you to heed it as well.

Never got to bar mitzvahs.