This Morning my Head Popped Off

This Morning my Head Popped Off.
by Kim aka Jarensbud

This morning, just after I’d brushed my teeth, my head popped off. You should have seen the expression on my face. Well, I mean, who expects that to happen anyway?

I was just looking in the mirror, smoothing my eyebrows and making sure that my nose wasn’t shiny when…’Pop’. I was left standing there with my shoulders sporting nothing but a neck. I felt around until I found my head and picked it up. When I held it up in front of the mirror, I gagged. There was a big red glob of hair sticking out from between my teeth. I know you know the kind I mean—the big, dusty, linty, dandruffy clump that you get when you clean out your brush—or in this case, my brother’s brush.

I guess when my head hit the floor it rolled into the corner of the bathroom behind the toilet, and you know how the mung builds up back there. I shuddered to think what was living in that big grungy clump of brother gunk. Anyway, I picked the gob of hair out of my teeth, rebrushed them, and then rinsed my head off under the tap.

Once my head was cleaned up a little, I held it up in front of the mirror and stared at myself. How was I supposed to go to school like that? It’s not like I could call my Mom at work and tell her what happened. She’d just tell me to quit making excuses and to get to school. Of course, when she came home and saw that my head had indeed popped off, she was going to lose her mind. She stayed in bed with a week long migraine after my brother lost his front teeth. When she saw my disembodied head… we were going to have to pour her into a tub of Tylenol #3. I guess you could say that she doesn’t deal well with change.

So, calling Mom was out of the question. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just stroll into school with my head tucked under my arm. You know junior high kids—they’re cruel. If I walked in there like that it would be like throwing a chunk of raw meat into a pack of hyenas. Having pale, yellowy hair had already marked me as the school goat; walking through the hallways with that mostly yellow, not so red, hair sticking out of the top of my Dad’s bowling bag was going to brand me for life.

My stomach flipped over… Oh no… Trevor. I’d been working for weeks to get his attention. Now I was sure to have his undivided attention… for the three seconds before he started laughing at me. Not really the impression I was going for.

“Look for the positive,” I told both parts of my reflection. “At least there isn’t any blood or gross bits hanging off the bottom.” I tilted my head until I could see the base of my neck reflected in the mirror. Nope, not gross. There was just a nice, neat cross section of muscle, bone, tendons and little veins that were still moving blood—I had no clue how that was working. I righted myself, blinked at my reflection, and shook my head between my hands. I was doomed.

“Hey, Kim, come on, I need to get in there. I’m going to be late for school.” My little brother shoved the bathroom door open before I could stop him and stared at me with a kind of revolted bliss. After a second he began to laugh. “Wohoho… you are going to be in so much trouble.”

“Trouble?” Trouble? What did the little wart think? That I’d done it on purpose? I held out my head so that I could see him properly, and flicked an unruly tuft of my hair out of my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. “Could you fight your natural urge to be a moron for just a minute, and help me figure out how to deal with this?”

He chuckled and shook his head for another few minutes then held up his hand to stave off my ire. “All right. All right. I’ll go get the duct tape.”

“Duct tape?” Turning my head to look down at the pale green floor tile, I chased him out of the bathroom and into the kitchen. “We can’t use duct tape. It’s going to stick in my hair. It’s going to pull and hurt… and we’ll never get it out.”

He snatched my head out of my hands and turned it around so that I could see my body. “At this point, does it really matter?” Plopping my head back in my hands he shrugged. “Okay, if you want to go to school that way.”

I sucked in a deep breath and let it out with a growl. “Okay, get the duct tape.”

When he was finished taping, Carl stepped back and surveyed his work. A satisfied grin spread across his face as he folded the end of the duct tape back on itself.

I fiddled with the collar of my sweater. “So, how does it look?”

He nodded. “It looks good… well, as good as your head ever looks.”

“Okay.” I patted my collar one more time then turned towards my bedroom; I had to get ready for school. I had taken two steps when something occurred to me. “Carl?” I called after him—he was already in his room.

“What?”

“Do you think Mom and Dad knew this could happen?”

“I dunno.”

“Cause if they did, don’t you think Mom would have come up to me one day and said. ‘We need to have a little talk. One day your head is going to pop off, and I’d like you to be ready so that you’ll know what to do.’? I could really use that talk right about now.”

***

Walking through the halls on the way to my first class with the duct tape hidden under my turtleneck, I let out my first sigh of relief. So far my brother’s plan was working. No one had even suspected that my head wasn’t still stuck firmly onto my shoulders. I strode through the door to my English class with confidence. Everything was going to be fine. The day would pass and when Mom came home tonight, we could figure out what to do. I sat in my desk in the front row and pulled out my books.

“Good morning class.” Mrs. Blaze stood up and walked around her desk. “Who wants to be the first one to read their essay?”

I stuck my hand in the air. I had spent the past two weeks slaving over my essay on Labyrinthine Constructs in Greek Myth. It was brilliant—a definite ‘A’ paper. As her eyes wandered over my seventh grade class I boosted myself up in my seat and waved my hand. When she smiled at me and called my name, I grinned back and looked down at the neatly typed title page sitting right there on top. I grabbed the binder rings and tried to pull them apart, but the spring was so strong that they were hard to force open.

What happened then proceeded very much the way things do in nightmares or horror movies. The rings snapped open with a sudden jerk, and my fingers slipped. The elbow that was supporting my weight jerked off the edge of the desk. I fell forward. My teeth clacked together as my chin hit the hard melamine surface, and the duct tape at the front of my neck let go with a ripping sound that left me with no doubt that all my neck hair had just been torn out.

I grabbed for my head, but by now, I am certain that you know what happened. My head tilted off to one side, and my scrabbling fingers managed to grab only a tuft of hair before it toppled off my shoulders. I saw the room going by in a whirling, dizzying haze as my head rolled across my desk, fell to the floor, and spun over the grey linoleum to come to a bumping halt up against Mrs. Blaze’s legs. Of course, when it stopped, I was face up, staring straight into the frozen faces of my classmates. Trevor looked as though he was going to vomit.

For an endless moment the room was silent then, like a storm breaking, my classmates let out a collective, whooping bellow of laughter, and the classroom dissolved into chaos.

“Look,” someone cried. “Kim’s head just fell off.” The voice sounded like Trevor’s but by that time I had closed my eyes and was trying my best to become invisible.

My body just sat in my chair while I tried to decide whether to fetch my head, or to just stay in my seat, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. A humiliated blush spread from the bottoms of my feet to the top of my… shoulders. I was doomed. How was I ever going to live this down? In the end, it was the mercy of Mrs. Blaze that saved me. She bent over, picked up my head, and carried it to my desk. I took it from her as she bent over and put her hand under my arm to help me up.

“Come along my dear,” she said in her most comforting and sympathetic voice. “We’ll go to the nurse’s office, and you can call your mother.”

The nurse, Ms. Sparks, sat behind her desk, staring at me with a sweet, understanding grin while I listened to the phone ring in my ear. Mother answered. “Hi Mom. It’s me, Kim.”

I sat silently through her worried litany.

“No, I’m fine… Well, it’s just… my head popped off this morning.”

Her scream was so loud that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. When it faded, I pulled the phone close again. She was shouting in the background…

Oh no, she was telling her whole office.

“Mom. MOM!”

She came back on, her voice high and excited.

“Well, Carl and I tried to tape it on, but it came off in the middle of English class.”

Her voice dropped three octaves as she enquired as to the state of my psyche.

“Well, I’ll never be able to show my face in school again, but other than that...”

Mom talked for a few more minutes then finished by saying that she’d hurry right over to pick me up.

“Don’t worry about that dear,” the nurse said. She gave me a wink. “It happens to everyone. I know that doesn’t make it any less embarrassing when it happens in public, but just you wait, by the end of the year, it will have happened to most of the girls in your class.” She shook her head. “Although, I would have thought your mother would have told you about the change. Oh dear. So, is your mother coming?”

I nodded. “She said she’ll take me home and show me how to keep it from coming off unless I want it to. I thought she’d be more upset, though. She really isn’t very good with change.”

“Nonsense. It is a day to be proud of. After all, how many times in a parent’s life do they get to help their daughter celebrate her first step towards becoming a woman?”

So, this morning my head popped off and humiliated me in front of the entire world. Mom says my arms will be next, but I shouldn’t have to worry about that until High School.

Dedicated to the memory of Jim Henson, a man who really knew how to make heads fly, and to Densua in whose honor my head first popped off and went rolling down the road singing “One Tin Soldier”.