And thus it happened that I lost my head:
I had been gardening, bent at the waist and forcefully churning a trowel in the large, rectangular flowerbed that parallels my porch, working to liberate the soil from a hardened layer of filth and death built up over the long winter months and the extreme hot and cold that indicates the arrival of spring.
My flowers had begun to decay last autumn, and I recall fondly sitting at the edge of the flowerbed watching their necks bend—more and more each day—toward the earth as though a heavy crown drew them prostrate. Petals that had been a vivid yellow or orange but a month earlier were by October or November dull and leaden. The insects that used to pick over these flowers had long gone where insects go during the cold months, and as I would sit watching my dead plants, I could almost hear the buzzing not of honey bees but of flies that gather around dead bodies.
By November and on into December, January, and February, my flowers had been reclaimed completely by the earth, and my flowerbed sat vacant and silent until weeds began to clamber to the surface in large numbers, strangling life where life might ordinarily reemerge.
Thus yesterday I took to ridding my flowerbed of weeds and the fossilized remains of the previous year’s growth. With my trowel, I had managed to work the soil into a rich brown, taking in the characteristic smell of dirt. Incidentally, in turning over the soil I unearthed a small cylindrical object that would turn out to be the head of a small child’s doll—though this was not immediately obvious to me.
About the size of a small orange and the color of soot with splotches of yellow and white, and brown, I initially thought this head a rock that had for some purpose ended up in my flowerbed. I snatched it up with my fist in angry haste and was intent on flinging it someplace far away until it began to speak to me from the hollow of my clenched hand.
“Excuse me……………………….Excuse me. Sir? Sir!” It was a woman’s voice.
I opened my palm. There were no discernible features to suggest that what I was holding should have been capable of speech.
“Sir, would you be so kind as to turn me over?”
Doing as requested, I transferred the woman from one hand to the other so that what had been facing down in the one hand was now facing up in the other.
There were two eyes—a vibrant, enchanting green—blinking at me in silence. There was also a mouth that appeared to have been painted on. The rest of the face was badly weathered. There was no nose; neither were there ears. If I speak, I wondered, will she be able to hear me? She had no hair.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You have no hair,” I replied.
“I used to. It was long and brownish-blonde. It was naturally wavy, but I would straighten it for special occasions.”
This made a great deal of sense to me, so I pursued the topic no further.
“What is your name,” I asked.
“K.”
“What an odd name. How do I spell it?”
“Just the letter K, please.”
K smelled like the earth, so I offered to draw her a bath.
“Just a bowl with warm water, if you have it,” she said in response. “I don’t need anything as elaborate as a bath. I am just a head, after all.”
I was saddened by what she said. Although I had just met K, there was a part of me that wanted to draw her a bath, gently wash the grime away, and revive her to her former self. I would have bathed her with the utmost care and, after drying her off, would have applied the finest lotions and oils I own with an equal caution. And if she had invited me to join her in the bath, I would have gladly stripped myself bare and cleansed my own body—filthy from tending my garden—as I cleansed her gentle face. The bath water—a translucent blue when first drawn—would certainly have become a murky brown, but neither of us would have been bothered. Indeed, we would have imagined we were religious relics that remained pure even amongst the dirtiest of conditions. But K was modest.
Cupping K in my hands and drawing them close to my torso—the way one might hold an injured sparrow— I retreated inside to the kitchen and set her down on the counter. From my cupboard I withdrew a large soup mug in the shape of a snowman’s head. I was fond of this mug—which my mother had given me for Christmas one year—and drank from it often. The possibility that K might take offense to this mug did not occur to me. Luckily, she remained silent.
I filled the snowman’s head halfway with warm water and—hoping to make a good impression—retrieved a hand towel and a bar of soap from the pantry and excused myself.
“Please,” I offered, “take your time. I’ll be in the sitting room.”
She said nothing, but perhaps her eyes sparkled in unstated gratitude.
From just beyond the kitchen, I heard a gentle PLOP—what I took to be K plunging into her bath. And although I couldn’t be certain (nor do I know today), I thought I detected a faint song emanating from her lips as she bathed herself.
She called for me several minutes later, and what I found as I returned to the kitchen was indeed a rejuvenated beauty. Gone were the odd splotches of various colors. Gone, too, was the smell of earth. K was a glimmering pearl; her eyes twinkled in the dim kitchen air, white and pinkish hues danced atop her healthy skin, and her head—which is to say, K herself—was of a sublime roundness that no other creature on Earth could possibly imitate. It was as though K had spun herself a cocoon out in my flower box and simply had to let the fine protective silk dissolve in the bath. Anybody else would have died out in the elements or would have at least grown flabby and unsightly.
As I entered the kitchen, K met my gaze but for a moment before casting her eyes down.
“Thank you,” she said.
Her reticence startled me. Was K embarrassed to be in my presence? Was what I took to be modesty—was what I took to be feminine restraint—in actuality a manifestation of K’s abhorrence toward me? Suddenly I was overcome with shame; I wanted to cower in the shadows or hide myself away in the basement or attic—for how could an unsightly creature such as myself survive in the midst of such a boundless radiance? The warmth of her glow would burn holes in my oily, flakey skin; I would flounder to the bottom of her eyes, my feet encased in concrete; my feeble frame would be crushed as she rolled across me on her way to a more suitable mate. I felt as though I were mere lines of graphite on paper; I was but a base, worthless stick drawing of a man slated for erasure.
“Sir,” she inquired, breaking a probable lengthy silence. “Is anything the matter?”
“Nothing at all,” I replied much too hastily. “I was simply admiring your beauty.”
I immediately regretted my remark, finding it in poor taste. I was simply admiring your beauty—what respectable man would say such a thing? Perhaps I should have told her the truth, that I was petrified—even, somehow, hopeful—that her radiance would destroy me.
How contrary I had become since K’s arrival. Until rather recently I had been prideful of my body. I would stand gazing at it in the full-length mirror in my bedroom as though it were an expensive piece of art I finally had the capital to acquire but hadn’t yet placed in my home or office. It was beautifully taut, the product of intense exercise—it was steel, it was indestructible. As a young man I had been unable to attract even the most hideous members of the opposite sex, encased as I was in a permanent state of boyhood, hampered by a body that was sickly and asexual. Yet as a man—with a body of substantial worth—I encountered numerous women who found my body enchanting. When I couldn’t sleep, I would count them and rate them in terms of attractiveness and sexual abilities.
But in recent months my virile body had begun to grow sterile and limp. I am at pains to explain why. It is as though my body had anticipated K and started to decompose in preparation for her arrival—similar to the ways dogs can smell approaching storms.
“Would you like anything to eat?” I broke the silence that settled over us.
“No. I’m fine, thank you. I would like to rest, however. I am very tired.”
“Of course.”
I gingerly scooped K up into my hands and, holding her close to my body, began to make my way to my bedroom. Her bath had made her warm to the touch and I frowned in spite of myself, knowing that I would soon have to put her down.
She said nothing as we crossed the foyer and made our way upstairs to my bedroom. Her breath was slight as it brushed against my hand.
There were two pillows on my nicely made bed. I set K down in the center of the fluffier of the two and stepped back. She blinked at me quietly as though waiting for me to say something of import. The full-length mirror, attached to the door of my bedroom closet, was much larger than I had remembered.
“Will you cut off my head?” I asked.
She said nothing.
“I would like you to cut off my head,” I implored.
“Why do you want me to do that?” she rejoined.
“So that we can be together.”
“But we are together right now.”
“You have misunderstood. We are in proximity to one another, it is true, but we are not together.”
“How is it that we will be together if I cut off your head?”
“Once I am headless, I will place you on top of my neck and we will be as one.”
“I forbid it.”
“Please.”
She closed her eyes and refused to open them. Were we a married couple, we might have called this a marital argument.
“Do you find me so unsatisfactory?” I whimpered.
From behind her clamped eyelids, K offered: “It is not that. I simply do not want to cut your head off. I would have no stomach for such a thing.”
“It will not be such a messy endeavor,” I countered. “I have a very sharp knife.”
“We have just met,” K rolled her eyes open and stared at me. She seemed confident.
“I do not care. I would like to join your head to my neck.” I stared back. I was suddenly equally confident and hoped she would acquiesce to my request before my confidence ran dry.
“Cut it off yourself, then,” K said.
“I could shoot myself in the head if I owned a gun. But I cannot cut it off. It is implausible.” I felt as though I were imparting wisdom to a small child. “Besides, I do not want to die. Shooting myself in the head would kill me. I simply want to live with you as my head and me as your body. Do you not need a body?”
“I do not. Nor do you need a head. You have one of your own.”
She was missing the point. I sought to explain. “Of course I have a head. But I would prefer it if you became my head and if I became your body. We would be joined as one, and it would be beautiful.”
“Cutting off your head is not beautiful.”
“You are beautiful.”
“Please do not resort to flattery. It is unbecoming.”
“Cut off my head.”
Either to appease me or to punish me, K spoke:
“Bring me your knife, then.”
Silently, I turned from K and toward the bedroom door, which led to the hallway, which led to the staircase, which led to the first-floor sitting area, which was adjacent to the kitchen, where my sharp knife was locked away. As I made my leave from K’s side, I caught my gaze in the full-length mirror. I looked gaunt and lifeless, as though my body had already portended its end. Although I quickly fled in disgust from my own gaze, I felt the gaze of the me in the mirror linger on the real me as I stepped toward the bedroom door. The me in the mirror seemed to follow me with its eyes, the way photographs of people in magazines do, and I became terrified. Making my way toward the kitchen, I–that is, the real me–began to decay rapidly. With each step, my bones splintered, and from the subsequent cracks in my skeleton a fine dust escaped. I felt the hair on my head slough off in large, tangled clumps. My skin melted like candle wax and slid off my desiccated skeleton, leaving large discolored holes in the dirty carpet under my feet where it landed messily. Resigning myself to a painful, lonely, and unorthodox death in a corridor of my home, I was surprised to find myself in my kitchen, standing whole and unharmed. Death has not yet accosted me, I concluded, I have simply seen the future. The knife I sought happened to have been a gift from a friend who died of an illness, the name of which I do not remember, in a hospital bed in an unimportant town, tended to by unimportant people.
Convinced his internal organs were conspiring against him, this friend–whose name is not important–went to the hospital to have them all removed and executed for lèse majesté. The doctor on duty ignored this now-dead friend’s request and had him committed to a psychiatric evaluation, where it was found that while he was not insane, he was, in fact, dying–and he had been for some time. He gave me the knife in question, he said before dying, so that I could avenge his death–reason being that he understood his illness as the underhanded scheming of his internal organs rather than the ill fortune of organic sickness.
I was to bide my time until he had been autopsied and all of his organs extracted, at which point I was to raid the hospital—wielding my sharp knife all the while—and demand access to his dismembered body, whence I was to stick my knife vengefully into his stomach, his spleen, his liver, his duodenum, his pancreas, his kidneys, and for good measure his testicles, which were not necessarily internal organs but deserved a good butchering nonetheless. At the time I obligatorily swore allegiance to my now-dead friend’s cause, knowing full well that I would use his gift not to avenge his death but rather to, one day, unite my body with that of a lover I would find outside in the dirt.
From a locked cabinet, I extracted the knife, thought momentarily of cutting off my tongue, and then mechanically made an about-face and marched back toward K.I returned to my bedroom to find K as I left her, sitting in the middle of the fluffier of my two pillows. Her eyes were closed as though she were deep in thought or asleep. The floor creaked as I crossed through the doorway, rousing K from her meditative state. She met my eyes with her own. She did not smile. Without speaking, I took a kneeling position at the edge of my bed and offered my knife gently with both hands, placing it at the base of K’s pillow–which seemed more of a throne at the moment. She was beautiful, and I would have hardly complained if she simply reached out to slash my throat and watch me die. This, of course, was not the plan. But just as I had betrayed my now-dead friend, ignoring his plea for vengeance, perhaps K would betray me. K eyed the knife in silence, drawing her gaze slowly from the base of the handle to the tip of the blade and back again. She lifted her gaze once again toward me and spoke softly: “Please, close your eyes.” Her eyes were alive with fire.
Shutting my eyes, I gave my body to K. She will not betray me, I told myself. We are to be as one.
I had nary a moment to anticipate the beloved union to follow before the knife was swung and my head lopped off. It bounced and rolled here then there, finally settling at the far corner under my bed. My body then waited—headless—for K to situate herself atop its neck.
Though my head was no longer attached to my body, my brain continued to function for a minor period of time. From where I—or rather, my head—was, I could see my beheaded body waiting patiently for K to fulfill her promise as the blood spilling from my body’s neck quickly formed a deep ruby-red pool at my body’s knees.
To my horror, I saw K leap from my bed and move toward the door, avoiding my body as though it were diseased. She was surprisingly agile.
“K,” I called from my place under my bed. “This was not what we decided.”
At the doorway she briefly turned.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, a moment of intimate communion—one head to another. “I do not want to live as your head.”
I began to cry. My body, undoubtedly weak from losing its head, collapsed to the floor as K turned away.
“K!” I called, to which there was no reply.
I tried again in vain: “K!”
She was gone.
I have to go after her, I decided and willed my body—now a lifeless mass hunched over itself and quickly surrendering to exsanguination—to will what life it had left.
Its shoulders seized and twitched and thrashed about under my command. Its arms flailed and flopped as I ordered it to reach out to me, its head and master. If only I can reassemble myself, I thought, I’ll be able to catch K. She is to be my head.
At my order, my body hurled itself into the side of my bed, sending its right arm and outstretched fingers toward me.
Just a little further, please.
My body’s fingers were like worms as they writhed along the carpet searching for extra length.
Just a little further.
My body lurched toward me one last time, its fingers probing in blind desperation.