(first published at Fourteen Hills 30)

That woman’s name started with an M, a firm clasp of the lips in the shape of a guillotine blade fucking the wooden platform, a prolonged hum in the throat, shrill as the wind ringing in the severed head’s ears. Petite stature, hair like gentle flames, maybe a cute face, too, not sweet enough to sway me, although sick enough for my tongue to taste bitter bilirubin, acidic stomach fluids that stuck to the edges of my teeth. Her perfume was always mild and wafted of the soft flowers sold in sprawled carts trampled by Parisian mud at the eve of Marie Antoinette’s execution. Like an angel of death, with her thumb in my mouth pushing down against my scratched tongue—her excuse was looking for a lost key down my throat, but she took that stitched heart out of my chest cavity and knocked a rib or two on the way, a polite request for entrance rejected by the body’s natural reaction to the taste of rusting blood on her fingerprints.

That woman, and the shy blue sky above the scintillating swimming pool, a bird catapulted dead by a stone above and the body of the next-door class’s new student accelerated down to the water with the same aching velocity of an erased childhood daydream, sometime and somewhere and somehow and so long, the sweetheart I’d never know, the life of happiness I’d never have.

What did the student think of as they fell? What did I think of as I was put in that room, like a damsel in distress? What did I think of as I fell?

“Wait for a moment,” that woman told me with a grin on her face, and hurried outside to scramble through half-empty boxes for tiny bottles of water that have probably been contaminated by invasive sunshine and sharp-smelling mosquito repellents. The door was glass. The sofa was leather. The table was glass. The air conditioner was split for two rooms—the gap between here and there ample enough to let the person in the other room to hear the staggered pulse of this dying heart. There was a bowl of coffee candies on the table, as if the void stomach of a severed head could taste coffee, as if there were still rough villi on my intestines to bring caffeine into my black blood. I wanted sulphur in my lungs, now or never. A proper school girl (a severed head) in tear-stained skirt and vomit-stained collars, curiously stared at by abrasive eyes that despised the mad, brought over into a mossy cell for ‘a talk’ that echoed ‘an interrogation’.

 No, this was not a mossy cell, no—this was a clean room meant for solving jigsaw puzzles and drinking milk tea with the teachers, heavily scented with floor cleaners and disinfectants, and it smelled more chemical than the ammoniac air of the chemistry laboratory that the only way possible to ground was by naming the components of a lavender room freshener; each structure, polarity, thermal capacity, lethality.

Silence, silence, silence, like underwater—no, wrong again—silence, like a

spiral gaping open on my forehead, unseen water dripping from the ceiling to my skin, maggots eating away my wet eyebrows, this was upturned Heaven and Hell and inferno and high school counselling room.

A faraway voice called out for my name, a distant melodic tone made of sugar and oxidised metal. That woman’s voice dispersed like the sea foam between my toes from the ocean water that seeped through the dysfunctional drain of this wrecked cell, said and unsaid in a quivering moment, bringing upon me a twitch of the severed head’s neck. Don’t dig up my corpse and turn me into a wax statue, then, leave me be by the steps of this room, let my death be a weapon that told a hundred years of stories built of crystallized trauma and the spoiled words of that woman. And, ah, it was like looming up a tower with a screeching elevator. Rocketed until I lost my teeth and slammed to the clouds like reversing a shooting star, I was unheard and unseen, small and begging to burst into debris. 

This was not what I wanted, this was not what I sought; I sought for lukewarm help and scorching comfort, not icy sentences fragmented with seemingly considerate pauses—that woman said, “You’re a weakling, hm?”

Why talk about the future to a severed head? I will have no husband or children. I will only kiss the lips of women I will never see again, you know.

“I can’t possibly console you like I would a child, hm?”

Console me like you would console a severed head. Let me be unhinged, let me sink my teeth into my own chin, let me be fireworks and cobwebs and poetry, let me be potent painkillers taken without prescription, let me be chisels of moonlight and dew and frog skin, let me be a child if I wanted to, let me— and console me like you would each one of those, console me like you would pain.

How would one console a child, exactly? The first time I was diagnosed as mentally ill, I was consoled with a strip of medication tablets and my mother’s exasperated anger. At that time, I was a ramshackle of this and that and this, yes—chisels of moonlight and dew and frog skin too and ultimately a child.

There was a wound on the back of my hand that had festered into a fucked up bloody mess, and yet, that woman still spoke, in a volume that only I could hear so that the person in the other room could only hear the slowing down of my breath, the sudden splash of body on chlorinated water. I didn’t think of anything.

After all, a severed head could only be silenced.