“The thing is,” she says, voice muffled out through my T-shirt, “what I said before, you know, never again, I can’t really promise that.”
“I know,” I say.
“I don’t really know what will happen.”
“I know.” I wrap the floss around my index finger like a ring and watch the blood shift. The tip of my finger turns waxy and purple.
“What would I do without you?” she says, and I get the floss around my wrist this time.
“Same thing,” I say as my hand darkens.
When I go to bed I think of Frieda but after a while I get bored. I don’t know what Frieda’s like. Janie, who I do know, is asleep. All her pill bottles are locked up in the trunk, and I own the key. It’ll take her a while this time to find where I hid the key; I’m getting better and better at stumping her. Last month it was floating in the bag of walnuts, and it would’ve taken a long time for her to find it except I forgot that she loves walnuts. Now we both hate them; Janie because of the taste in her mouth, me because when I found her, they were scattered all over the floor surrounding her and for a second I actually thought they were tiny shriveled lungs with all the air sucked out of them.
This time, the key is hidden under the bathroom counter. Where the lip of the counter rises above the floor? I have taped it. You only notice if you’re lying flat down on the bathroom rug, relaxing, or if you’re running your hand along the rim. So this round should take at least a few months. One of these days, I’ll just do my duty and make a scene and dump all the pills down the toilet like I’m supposed to and Janie will cry and cry and then find herself a new boyfriend.
Until then, it’s our best time together. She plays with my hair. She sits on the sofa in the slanted light with her guitar and sings songs with my name in them that she makes up on the spot. When she was six, she won that beauty contest talent competition by singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking” with a pretend guitar slung around her shoulder and a dance routine. All the adults cheered as she stomped about in her country-western outfit. All the other kids started crying backstage when they heard the thunderous applause. We still have the trophy; it’s locked inside the trunk with the pills tucked inside the cup part like a sordid story in a celebrity magazine at the airport. The boots she wore are in there too; they’re really little, made of thin yellow leather with fringe on top and a silver badge on the side. I didn’t have anything special to add, but just to be fair, I put my report cards from junior high school in the trunk too. I got all As. I have always been a good student.
Ironhead
The pumpkinhead couple got married. They had been dating for many years and by now she was impatient. “I’m getting cooked,” she told him, and she took his hand up her neck to the inside of her head so he could feel the warmth of the flesh there, how it was growing soft and meaty with time; he reeled from both burden and arousal. Taking her hand, they walked over to the big soft bed and while he unbuttoned her dress, he thought about what she was asking for and thought it was something he could give her. He slipped his belt out of the loops and the waist of his pants sighed and fell open. When the pumpkinheads had sex, it was at a slight angle so that their heads would not bump.
They had a big wedding with a live jazz band, and she gave birth to two children in the span of four years, each with its own small pumpkinhead, a luminous moon of pumpkin, one more yellowish, one a deep dark orange. The pumpkinhead mother became pregnant with her third child in the seventh year, and walked around the house rubbing her belly, particularly the part that bulged more than the rest. At the hospital, on birth day, the nurses swaddled the baby in a blanket and presented him to her proudly, but she drew in her breath so fast that the pumpkinhead father, in the waiting room watching basketball, heard through the door. “What is it?” he said, peeking in.
She raised her elbow which cradled the blanket. The third child’s head was made of an iron.
It was a silver model with a black plastic handle and when he cried, as he was crying right now, steam sifted up from his shoulders in measured puffs. His head was larger than the average iron and pointed at the tip.
The father stood by his wife and the mother adjusted the point so that it did not poke her breast.
“Hello there, little ironhead,” she said.
The siblings came running in from the waiting room, following their father, and one burst out laughing and one had nightmares for the rest of her childhood.
The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standing by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. The pumpkinhead mother quickly put the iron away; she understood; she imagined it was much the way she felt when one of her humanhead friends offered her a piece of seasonal pie on Thanksgiving.
“Next year,” she told her husband that November, “I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I’m serving a big human butt.”
Her husband was removing his socks one by one, sitting on the edge of the bed, rolling them into a ball.
“And for dessert,” continued his wife, stretching out on the comforter, “we will have cheesecake from brains and of course ladyfingers and-” She started laughing then at herself, uproariously; she had a great loud laugh.
Once undressed, her husband lay his head flat on her stomach and she held the wideness of his skull in her hands and smoothed the individual orange panels.
“I think our son is lonely,” she said.
They made love on the bed, in a quiet relaxed tangle, then threw on bathrobes and went to check on their children. The two girl pumpkinheads were asleep, one making gurgling dream noises, the other twitching. They shook the second gently until her nightmare switched tracks and she calmed. Shutting the door quietly behind them, the parents held hands in the peace of the hallway, but when they stepped into the ironhead’s room, they found him wide awake, smoothing his pillowcase with his jaw.
“Can’t you sleep, honey?” asked his mother. He shook his head. He had no eyes to look into, but the loll of his neck and the throw of his small body let them know he was upset. They sat beside him and told a story about zebras and licorice. He tucked his head agreeably on the pillow and listened the whole time, but his parents tired before he did and tiptoed out of the room, figuring he was asleep. No. He never slept, not because he didn’t want to but simply because he couldn’t, he didn’t know how. He spent a few more hours staring at the wall, feeling the sharp metal of his nose, breathing out clouds into the cramped sky of his bedroom. Around three in the morning, he read a picture book. At five, he snuck to the kitchen and had a snack of milk and cookies. He felt very very tired for four years old.
• • •
At school, the ironhead made no friends because he was expected to be a tough guy due to the sharpness of that metal point, but he was no tough guy and preferred the sandbox to the grass field. He filled buckets with sand and then submerged them in sand. One afternoon, tired of being teased by the seas of children with human heads and his sisters who escaped ridicule by being the best at every sport, he left the playground by himself and went for a walk. He walked past the residential area of town, with the friendly rickety houses and their green-yellow lawns and an occasional free-standing mailbox in the shape of a cow or a horse. He walked past the milkman, whose arms were full with glass bottles of frothy white, all set to be delivered, and who laughed at the iron-head, which just made steam rise from the boy’s neck. He walked until he reached a big field, one he’d never seen before. Beyond it was a building. Glancing around, the ironhead crossed the field, lifting his little legs high to clear the tall patches of weeds, and the air was shifting smell now, it smelled bigger than the town did, pollen riding on wide open space, immigrant seedlings.