(in the "Baldie Stories 1" collection - on sale at Amazon.com)
They
couldn’t find the top of him so they used an old half a cantaloupe to punctuate
the clear run of ruin above his mouth. “How’s he even sitting up like that? You
need a brain to sit up like that, don’t ya?”
“I
think so, but it’s like that chicken thing; they run around a bit before they
die.”
Then
it spoke. It put a finger up to the top of it, scratched at the dirty rind,
found a half an ear and inserted a finger clear through to where that part of
the brain should have been.
“Gettem...
gettem here to the spital- ohspital - getteme ospitl....”
“Crap!
The hospital! Call 911.”
They
led him, on foot into the emergency room. He refused to sit. Even with half a
head, he was stubborn. Later, while the surgeons were shrugging around the
operating table, the cops were asking questions in a room next to the emergency
waiting area.
“I
don’t exactly know. We didn’t know him, just saw him there after the car backed
up off his head. He must have been drunk. But then he sat up, and it looked...”
“Yeah
- it looked like he was going to try to light a cigarette. But the top of his
head was gone. Looked like a bowl of old soba noodles. Ick…Christ!”
Two
days later he was transferred to a special clinic in Colorado. Two weeks later,
he was on a plane for Germany. They’d managed to keep the infection at bay by
topping him off with a glorified fish bowl. There was puzzlement all around.
Not only didn’t the man with half a head not die, but he seemed to be
communicating just fine with a pad and a pencil. Nasal passages worked with
some assistance, feeding tube did its job. The major hunk of brain that went
missing appeared to be superfluous to begin with.
His
family was contacted. They weren’t surprised.
“Sounds like something that joker would pull off” was what his brother
had to say. His mother was fine with it as long as they never got a bill for
any of the work performed. No one expressed interest in seeing the man.
His
name was Stanley. And even with half a head, he was one completely irritating
guy.
"He
keeps writing that he wants to listen to Beethoven's fourth piano sonata! God
damned doesn't have ears! Shit-basket doesn't have a skull to hang ears on! For
fuck sake, I quit!"
And
that was the fourth personal attendant in five days. Stanley complained about
the darkness, the pain in his face, nicotine withdrawal, pissing down his leg,
and he wanted soup! He wrote it:
Sopu
soupp nou fuker nou!
Stanley's
father suggested they drive him to the expressway and let him find his own way
home.
"Son
of a bitch can still play the piano, he can find his way through six lanes of
traffic."
"Why
do you hate our son so much!?" They’d paused to take a look. At the
hospital's fairly decent upright piano, Stanley is leaning into the tangle of
the fourth piano concerto’s first dawn, fish bowl for a skull tucked into a
bloody gauze ascot, thumping away as if nothing were at all wrong.
Sidney
pointed at the nightmare, wiggled a finger at it.
"Same
reason I hate you so much! You fucked up my life without even trying! Look, at
least now he's got some effort into it! No fucking head, no fucking brains, but
he’s still ruining my life, one second after the next!”
"Sidney!
It's terrible! Look at him - that horrible, horrible thing plugging the rest
from spilling out his neck! He's your boy! Your boy!"
"Darlene,
you've said it so many times I'm starting to wonder whom you're trying to convince!"
Stanley
sensed the discord; the vibrations came to his knees and elbows with the
sensitivity of perfectly honed tuning forks. He wrote with two hands on two
separate pieces of paper, rarely defining which words follows which, page to
page. It was an unbearable torture to decode the double-handed rant.
"Piss
off, something, something Else, the. Piss off some more. Lousy parents.... so
on. "
Sydney
laughed heartily, threw the note on the hospital floor, and laughed some
more.
"This
kid is some ball buster. Honestly, no head - chin up, nothing, and he's still
telling us what to do."
Sidney
turned to the new attendant. "What took you so long? You’ve been on
standby since yesterday?!”
“Yes,
sir. It’s just...all the shouting. I figured…"
Sidney
snarled, “Don’t figure! Look at that! That thing is supposed to be my son! If I
started figuring, where’d you think I’d end up? No. No figuring. Unless you
figure out how to make this all go away. Then let me know what’s on your mind.”
If
Darlene seemed at odds with Sidney over Stanley's condition, his well-being, or
the possibility of an emotional tether to their youngest offspring, it was
merely the brute force of the maternal instinct hat had overcome the aging
mother.
In
fact, when the answering machine took that first call from the police, it was
Darlene who said, "Don't pick it up! If we're lucky he's dead - If
not, I don't even want to know."
But
later, the curious nature of the condition of their boy, the hints of potential
profit that lurked burbling just under the base of his skull: talk shows, book
deals, options - hell, they'd been contacted by a major toy manufacturer who
wanted to pay dearly for rights for the name and identity of "Stanley The
Headless Wonder Doll! " - they found something inside each of them that,
when polished by desire, managed to look awkwardly like diffident care,
strangulated love, or some other common pathology that passed for familial
attentiveness.
"He's
the worst of both of us, and nobody's math can add those things together without
sobbing at the end of it!"
Sidney
winced in the parking lot, "I mean, they'll know we hate him before I
hang up my hat!"
But
they hadn't counted on Darlene's maternal instinct.
One
look at half a head and it didn't matter how horrible the little shit had been
to the world, it was her little shit! Her little shit without a face!
"He
wants hair!?" Sidney screamed. He clutched the bed rail and shivered.
"He
doesn't even have a brain and he wants hair! He doesn't have eyes or cheeks or
a god-damned mouth and he's still telling us..."
The
old man quaked. Veins in his neck pulsed and flexed and the flesh on his face
jelly-rolled through a rainbow of horrific expressions, colors, ungodly
contortions. Then, right before poor old Sidney dropped dead, dead and
quivering still - he got out the last couple of words that would finish him for
good:
"He
wants a new hairdo!?"
The
sound of Sidney shattering from the inside out was audible. Darlene had an
eyebrow up and the doctor, who looked more intrigued than startled, had to lift
his glasses over his eyes to be certain he wasn't seeing things. He nearly
spoke, but didn't.
Darlene
walked over and nudged her husband’s corpse with the blunt toe of her left
shoe.
"Sidney?"
The
doctor knelt down beside the dead man and checked for a pulse, flipped an
eyelid, and thoughtlessly thumped a thought out on Sidney's forehead with a
pencil.
"He
has died," said the doctor.
At
that moment, Stanley began to burble. Burble and bubble. He swayed and grasped
at the air around him and a thin gruel of bloody matter erupted from the fleshy
mess at the top of him.
"What's
happening?" screamed Darlene.
"I
don't know!" exclaimed the doctor.
"Do
something!" screamed Darlene.
"But...
but…" stammered the doctor, unsure of exactly what the emergency protocol might
be when dealing with a patient with no head.
More
blood and phlegm splattered about as Stanley began to swing about, left and
then right and then back again.
Darlene
screamed some more and then screamed again. She took it all in, dead husband at
her feet, her only son - she remembered a moment of pure pleasure, the infant
smiling - now reduced to this unspeakable horror...
Her
shrieks increased until she found it impossible to shriek any longer. The
doctor bounded across the room to upright Stanley and with one hand
outstretched, poked a finger into his fleshy blow-hole to stem the loss of
blood. Darlene tripped over her dead husband's body and split her skull wide
open on the cast-iron lift mechanism at the foot of the bed.
Darlene
was dead before the doctor felt the quality of quivering that emanated from the
orphaned boy’s body. It was not the quaking distress of choking. It wasn't the
flailing of fear or terror - not at all. The doctor withdrew his finger from
Stanley's gullet and put a hand on the headless man's back.
"You
are laughing?" whispered the doctor, horrified.
"Evil,
through and through."
Stanley
flailed about until he found a sheet of paper. The doctor handed the headless
man a pen. Stanley swayed over the sheet as he wrote. When he was finished he
tossed the sheet into the air above his shoulders. The doctor pulled it out if
the air.
It
said:
‘Greedy
people! Hated me. Wished me dead but wanted profit from this horror. Their
son...
I
want a head. Make me a head. Put hair on it! Don't get greedy.’
The
doctor looked up slowly.
Stanley
shook with joy. He was feeling better, much better indeed.
The End
