Perfectly Shaped Head

I HAVE A PERFECTLY SHAPED HEAD.

When Momma pushed me out, into the hands of a sticky-fingered midwife, I was as malleable as clay. The old woman pressed her thumbs into my skull and caressed my skin like she was the moon, crafting the height and smoothness of the tides. I became a perfect sphere, with an orb pinched to my neck like a balloon full of air with nowhere to go.

My head is huge. Everything about my face is large. My eyes are large, not crescents or almond slivers, like Mary’s. Mine are fucking grapefruits. They look just as sour, too. My teeth belong to a horse and my ears are shells, leftover from the ocean. But none of this matters, because the shape of my head is perfect. That’s why I’m pretty—no bumps, no moles, no haphazard hills or valleys. I am perfection.

People weren’t always this way. Daddy sometimes talks about the time before phrenology was such a heavy-handed subject. Now it’s an important part of our government and society. On occasion, Daddy will smoke his maroon pipe in the living room lounge chair and pick ash out of his mustache, talking about his great-grandma who killed herself.

“She killed herself, Lizbeth,” he says, smoke curling around his nose, “Because she had an egghead. Soft boiled, lumpy. She was screwed from the beginning.” He says she could have belonged in one of those glass egg dishes rich people like to peck out of with those tiny forks like mini spears.

A lot of people kill themselves, if they have a lump here, or a lump there. I once met a man whose whole head was covered in curves and pointy summits. He was shot on the street, a bullet diving straight through his forehead. He fell backward like a ragdoll, all rice inside, no bone or cartilage.

Most people slit their wrists or hang their necks or smash bottles over their heads if they were born without a midwife. Since my great-grandma’s death, my family has paid for midwives to sculpt each newborn baby.

Often, I wonder what it would be like if Michelangelo was still living. What if he was my sculptor, with his delicate, artist hands? Perhaps I would be a god. I would be rich, contoured, a vision made of angles and hard lines, my cheeks akin to ceramic dolls.

My friend, Mary, has a bump on her head. She hides it with hair, which she piles so high she could be an actress in Hairspray. She told me about it a year ago, when we were alone at my house. She whispered it, for that was the only way to say such a thing. She spoke like she was underwater, like she was blowing bubbles or talking through a coral reef wall. Slowly, frantically, lips-pursed, quivering, blue-tinted. Quick.

I made a choice not to to tell on her. I could have told anyone, shouted it across an empty street, and the world would know, saying, You are an imperfect piece of horseshit, but instead I threw up in the kitchen sink, which smelled like old coffee grounds.

I could have told on her, and snitches don’t get stitches anymore, but now, here she is, standing next to me. Laughing, because Mary loves to laugh. I think that might be because of the placement of her bump. It’s a straight shot up from her ear, and is slightly pronounced (she let me feel it, it feels like a swollen bee sting or spider bite) and according to Daddy’s charts, that’s where she holds hope. Mary, for better or for worse, is the most hopeful person I know.

But she shouldn’t be hopeful.

Daddy knew a work friend who was flayed for the bump around the curve of his ear, which is centered around destructiveness. Daddy told me the story while he was listening to his favorite Steve Martin comedy, The Man with Two Brains, and the scene was talking about beds and women and sex. He slid the old VHS tape into the TV, rewinding it like a flashback. Daddy likes old things like that.

His friend was skinned, goddamnit.

Mary’s skin is onion paper, it’s sickly and lavender and because I am perfect, I cannot understand what it must be like to suffer.

Mary is smart, though. She can recite books as lengthy as Paradise Lost, and once, I caught her speaking to herself in the mirror, her eyes connecting with her reflection, saying, “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly, Infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide, to which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

And now she is sitting next to me, long legs folded like an accordian, her lips pressed together to suppress her laughter. I don’t remember what made her laugh in the first place. Was it something I said? She always seems to be laughing at me.

I think I’ve held onto her secret because I’m jealous, but Daddy would shoot me if I said that outloud. Mary is smart, though, so quick and capable. Her outfits match and her handwriting is pretty, like she’s drawing on water, and her voice is soft, not hard and grunting and gristly, like fatty meat, like Daddy’s. My brain can’t do shit, I know. I can’t count higher than ten, my nights are filled with terrors, and I can’t remember if I’ve killed a man.

But goddamnit, I’m fucking perfect.

And Mary will be the one to die, just like Daddy says, and I will set the house on fire after leaving the oven on, and no one can make a decision anymore because we all have heads that resemble perfect cups of applesauce.

For the most part, I am numb. It feels like I’m floating, like my conscious is separate from my fingers which are too thin for their own good. Other times, it feels like I am living fire, like I have a head made of such sharp and excruciating pain, I might die by pure natural forces alone. Except, there is nothing natural about my head, about my very being, and I very much want to let the pain kill me sometimes.

Mary could rule the world if her skin wasn’t so thin, if she wasn’t such a sweet singer, if she wasn’t a poet who put lines like Shit ain’t for shit, but I am not shit together.

Mary is special. She is a different breed, which makes my secret keeping even harder. She isn’t quiet, like me, or the rest of my friends; she flips people off, she sticks her tongue out, she breaks glass and sometimes I think she’s a tornado. She hides in her house with her big hair and works on toughening her skin, reading books as big as my teeth, thinking about topics I can’t even articulate with grunts.

She screams, sometimes, when she reads.

Momma screamed when she gave birth to me. But when she saw my head, all round and decent and unscarred, my hair orange and sprouting from new roots, and I was the sun, a second Saturn maybe (or perhaps saturnine) and I was going to be fucking perfect.

***

I roll out of bed, landing on the hardwood floor, snapping my shoulder against my neck. I think I was dreaming about worms, how they don’t have eyes, how the look like digested pieces of food, how I want to kill one for no reason at all. And then I became a worm, inching away from my pillow until I landed on the ground, cheek to floor.

I rub my face. My eyes are full of crusted dust and it takes a second to pick the pieces out of my tear ducts. I blink a few times before standing, my feet heavy, my head rolling on my neck like an upside down pendulum.

The closet door opens, and I see a little hand wiggle out, waving, fingers cracking like a broken firework. Mary grins at me, all Cheshire cat, her eyebrows raised.

“Did you fall out of bed again?” she wraps her hair into a scrunchie, leaving extra hair on the top of her head so it’s a little messy.

“I am a worm,” I say, which isn’t what I want to say, but I can’t think of the words.

“No you’re not, Lizbeth. You’re a human. You have legs. See?” she points to my legs, which I know are my legs, because that’s how I’m standing. “You have chicken legs.”

Mary used to live on a farm, with lots of chickens. I recall their legs, which were thin, red, like licorice ropes but they didn’t look chewy, more crunchy. “Okay.”

She finishes tightening her hair and brushes some dirt off her pants. “Last night was wild,” she says. “I was invited to Vince’s, but the cops came. I almost got shot.”

That’s why she’s in my closet, then.

“Better than being flayed.” I’m constantly thinking about Mary getting flayed. Sometimes, I want to see it happen, because I’m very nearly sure she has the prettiest bones of any human, like ivory tusks. But most of the time, I’m afraid for her, because getting skinned is the worst way to go.

“I’m not going to get caught, okay? You don’t have to be angry.”

I like how she can tell I’m angry. Sometimes my eyes and eyebrows can’t move, it’s like they’re stuck in place, and I have a hard time showing how I am feeling. I think that’s what is happening now, since my eyebrows feel like they’re sewn onto my skin, like embroidery.

“Okay,” I say.

“Let’s go outside,” she says. “You need some fresh air.”

Mary thinks she always knows what’s best for me. I don’t think that’s true, though. Right now, I wish I could go back to sleep.

But Mary grabs the fleshy part of my arm and drags me through the house until we get to the front door. She holds it open for me and points to the sky. “It’s going to rain.”

The clouds are tempestuous. They’re graveyard clouds, moldy whipped cream clouds.

“We have to be careful,” I say, a phrase I have learned to repeat around Mary.

“I’ve always admired the rain,” she says.

I find my eyebrows, unstitch them, and raise them as a question. “Why?”

“Because after the rain comes a rainbow.” She rubs the bump on her head, and goddamnit, I almost want to shoot her.

“You can’t talk like that.”

Daddy calls it overpronunciating, which means to make a certain trait clear. His friend, the one that got skinned, was a pyromaniac; he set his apartment on fire and killed a bunch of people. He kept going on and on about dying by the stake, being burned alive, but they thought he deserved worse punishment.

Mary can’t talk about rainbows, or else people will catch on, check her skull, and realize she isn’t perfect. And I can’t let that happen.

“Relax, there is no one around to hear.”

I try to let out a breath, but it gets stuck on my tongue, tripping over the word No, and I end up coughing.

Mary rubs my back until my cheeks feel less red.

“Let’s take a walk,” she says. She holds my hand as we trail down the front porch towards the sidewalk.

Lots of billboards are piled at the end of the street, caught in between the sagebrush and tumbleweeds. It’s election season, which means everyone is talking badly about each other, throwing names around as toxic and accusing candidates of having bad history.

“Who are you going to vote for?” Mary asks. She lets go of my hand to pick up a stray, windblown Ruffles bag.

“No one. I don’t care who wins.”

“Bullshit,” she say, “You care plenty.”

I want to say Mary is the one who cares, is the one who should care, since she can think about the future, while the words in my head are too repetitive, saying Step on a crack and you break your Momma’s back, and Momma would kill me if I broke her back.

Mary notices my mania and guides me towards the street, which is much better, since the asphalt doesn’t scare me.

“I don’t want you to vote for that man,” Mary says, pointing towards a red, white, and blue poster board with a man wearing a bowtie. He has teeth just like mine. “He’s a nihilist.”

I’ve heard of this word, maybe I once wrote it on the back of my hand as an important word to remember. But I don’t remember. I pretend to understand, and say, “Okay.”

“Nihilism is the belief that no belief matters,” Mary says, not looking at me. “And you believe in a lot of things, right?”

I nod my head. I believe in strong coffee. I believe in puppet shows, those are funny. I believe in clipping my toenails, or else they’ll get too long. I believe in Mary, who is too smart for her own good. I believe in consequences.

“What do you believe in?” I ask Mary.

She smiles, her gums pink and well-washed. Sometimes, when Mary smiles, I want to smell her breath, because I think it would smell nice. “I believe in hope.”

I trip.

My hands catch me before my head can hit the ground, but my knees scrape the road, cutting into my skin, and I’m bleeding. It drips, dreamlike, a river of my insides spilling into the earth like wine from a broken glass.

Mary yelps, ducks over to help me, coddling me, shhhingin my ear, and I am a newborn baby again, tucked in Momma’s arms, sleepy and jaundiced and brain dead.

I scream, and it’s so loud, I think the sun has to blink for a second, squinting.

Mary is crying now, and I don’t know why. She never cries, she has too much hope to do something as silly as cry.

She pulls me up, holds me close to her chest, and I don’t know why the tears fall so quickly down my cheeks. It’s just a scraped knee. But it feels like something more than that. It feels dangerous, being outside with Mary at my shoulder, thinking the world will accept someone with her mental capacity and vigor for life.

Her words scare the shit out of me.

I wipe my nose with the back of my hand. “Don’t ever speak like that,” I say.

She smiles, just a little.  “Why are you so afraid?”

It feels like this is a conversation I’m not prepared for, something I have no words in which to communicate. So I say, “Blood, blood, too much blood.” It feels like it’s spilling out of my mouth, like a magician’s trick, like there’s a capsule behind my teeth that’s cracked open, dripping.

“It’s just on your knee,” Mary says. She kisses my forehead. “Don’t be afraid of blood.”

I want to tell her, I’m not afraid of a wound, I’m afraid of losing you, I’m afraid of dying without thinking, I’m afraid of you dying thinking too much.

But everything is fuzzy, blurry, an unfocused camera lense, and I can’t put two and two together, my words get caught, stuck, and I’m chewing on cotton balls.

“Okay.”

We keep walking, blood sticking to my pants.

“What are you thinking?” Mary asks, after we turn the corner.

I think about telling her the truth, on focusing my words, on the flesh of my brain that still works, that still feels. I want to say, I am fucking perfect, but there’s another phrase, I am nothing more than humanand the last thought, I’m a monster, I am crafted by electricity, a series of parts too big to fit together, to belong—

“Nothing.”

Mary nods. “It’s okay to be afraid,” she says, which seems contradictory to her last statement, telling me not to be afraid. But this time something in her eyes looks watery, not tears, but like a force field showing itself. “You’re allowed to be afraid.”

There’s so much to be afraid of, I know. Daddy hitting me, whipping me into the corner, his violence misguided, confused, blinded and full of rage. The lightning strikes on my back scare me. Momma lying to my face, telling me after all, You are not perfect, you are ugly, you belong in the ground. Mary dying, her bones and blood unwrapping for the world, her bump sucking into her skull, disappearing, shriveling her hope.

Goddamit, I’m afraid of feeling hope.

Mary points to the sky again and says, “What if the sky was dictated by rules, like the shapes of our heads? What if we said there couldn’t be rain, if a cloud couldn’t form a certain shape, if we committed to hurricanes, no sun, a word where the sky couldn’t be new everyday?”

Right now, it’s baby green, like mushy peas, just at the horizon lines, then it fades into a dull blue. Clouds streak the sky, like rips in paper. I get lost in the color for a second, thinking about her words, wondering what would happen if the sky was black, a world where everything was suffocating in faded moonlight.

I get dizzy, my eyes swim, and I find Mary’s eyes. She smiles, her teeth showing broadly. Her gaze dips downward, showing her emotions, her sadness, her love for something as big as the sky.

“I would kill myself,” I say, and I think I mean it. I would skin my own heart if I couldn’t have the sky.

She kisses my forehead again. “Now you understand.”