After waking up from a deep, all-consuming sleep, I leaned forward in a groggy daze to kiss my wife and found only blank space. Believing that I had missed the target of my morning affection, I aimed blindly downward and tried again – only to be met with the same absence. How odd, my wife must have been sleeping at a most peculiar angle. For by my estimation, what with my arms currently being wrapped around her gently heaving body, to miss my kiss her head must have been positioned at an almost complete right angle to her torso.
The macabre unnaturalness of this image disturbed my sleep-addled brain, forcing my eyes open only to be instantly blinded by the bright sunlight streaming into our room from the far window. Blinking, I searched with increasing bewilderment for any sign of my wife`s head. In that space where a human head should have been, where it always was at 7 am on a Wednesday morning, there was nothing but plump and unpressed pillow.
My wife breathed steadily under my arm.
I shuffled upward cautiously, not wanting my confusion to disturb her slumber. I clambered out of bed and onto the woolly carpet, pulling on my pitch-black dressing gown. Surveying the scene, I realized with growing vexation that wherever I searched amongst the linen, still I couldn’t locate my wife’s head.
Straight as an arrow, her body lay on its back in a steadily heaving bundle. Intact feet were attached to full and familiar legs, at the tops of which rested an ample torso with not a mark or scratch upon its surface. But there was no head. Across her neckline Fran merely had a smooth stretch of skin that arched from shoulder to shoulder like a fleshy horizon. I stood and blinked for several minutes.
Then our alarm went off – frightening me half to death – and the body of Fran jerked up in bed and stretched its arms upwards in a gesture that I had seen thousands of times before. With equally uncanny movements the body swung out of bed and opened the curtains the rest of the way. Sunlight cascaded into the room, transforming her into a ghoulish silhouette embedded within an impenetrable wall of light.
“Fran? Fran, hello honey?” The body swayed for a few seconds at the window, before turning and drifting past me into our en-suite. It picked up a toothbrush and applied some toothpaste, before lifting the brush into the air. Scrubbing and scraping at intangible teeth, it was brought back and forth in precise, aimless motions, stopping only so the body could lean forward and not-spit matterless nothing into the wash basin.
Finishing up, the figure ran the taps and had another stretch, before turning in my general direction. I looked at my own face reflected in the mirror where Fran`s head should have been. I fled the room. My first thought was to send for help as soon as possible. Running downstairs I snatched up my phone from the kitchen counter and frantically tapped in the number of Doctor Medley – a gentile local physician that we had met the day my son was born. He would no doubt be irate at being contacted so early, however I reassured myself that the situation justified the somewhat rude intrusion. The phone rang and rang endlessly, before someone finally picked up on the other end. I launched into a frantic plea.
“Doctor Medley, I`m so sorry to be contacting you this early, but I’m having the most awfully strange morning. It’s my wife, you see. Well… the only way I can describe it is that she has lost her head! The poor woman has unable to say a word all morning, Doctor, and I really must insist you come over and give your professionally assessment immediately!” A silence fell in the wake of my panicked rambling. As Doctor Medley mulled over what I had said, I shifted from foot to foot in anxious anticipation. The minutes dragged on, and still no response. I grew suspicious of the quality of our line, and checked to see if the call had failed. Electronic numbers ticked steadily upward, and still the call was silent.
“Doctor Medley, please. I am aware this is a lot to process before breakfast, but I am in quite a state of distress! My wife is gravely unwell and needs help. Any information you can give me at all would be much appreciated! Perhaps you have come across something like this before in your years of practice?”
Still no answer from the good Doctor. It was perplexing, for the phone seemed to be working in perfect order. Listening closely, I could even hear the distant clatter of activity through the line – someone was moving around in the Doctor’s house behind him, and yet not a word from the man himself. I hung up and placed the phone back on the counter, fear rising in my chest. My mind began to spin with a thousand frightful possibilities. My ruminations were broken by the creak of the stairs as someone made their way steadily downwards. Two legs appeared, proceeding in the habitual, confident steps of a permanent resident of the house.
What was left of Fran stepped into my vision. It had dressed itself in one of her smart business suits, and clinging to it was the faintest whiff of perfume. It took me a while to figure out what was bundled up in its arms, but when I recognized what it was, I felt the whole earth shake violently beneath my feet. Drifting towards me in the ringing silence was my poor headless wife, carrying delicately in its arms a little headless baby. My son writhed and squirmed in those familiar little ways whilst the torso of Fran tickled his belly. No excited gurgling accompanied the activity; Alfie was as silent and expressionless as he had ever been.
“Alfie, my child! Oh, my poor son! Fran! How could this have happened? Don’t you see what’s happened to our boy?”
I looked imploringly between them, trying to find understanding in each abyss. Questions assaulted my mind: had my baby contracted the same illness as my wife? How had they woken together to the same peculiar fate? Had Fran taken it upon herself to remove our babies head herself? Was this an infection, or even a plague – where family decapitated family and friends beheaded friends? Or was this some sort of criminal enterprise? The work of nefarious head-burglars sweeping the neighbourhood, pilfering any human domes they could get their hands on? My mind roiled with a thousand possibilities whilst the remainder of my family shuffled off to the kitchen. The sound of clattering plates heralded an ill-fated breakfast.
***
I flung open the front door and ran into the street in desperation. The sun bore down on my head with an oppressive intensity, the gravel on which I walked scraped and clawed at the soles of my feet. From above and below I felt the onslaught of the elements. I realized distantly that I was still in my dressing gown, though it failed to worry me. The neighborhood was strange and silent, save only the birds chirruping in the trees. I proceeded through the streets, drifting towards the center of town. My vague aim was to find someone in a familiar predicament as me; some competent and dependable fellow-traveler with a good head on their shoulders, who would know exactly where we should go and what we should do. Even then, however, some part of me intuited the true nature of my predicament.
I had walked only a brief distance before I started to see them. They emerged from doorways, shambled along pavements, gathered in small clusters in gardens and driveways. Every human shape dotted along the street was identical in its oddity: each one was that of a headless English suburbanite.
Occasionally they would stop and interact with their fellows, posing and gesticulating at one another in a stilted pantomime of human communication. No language could be seen in any of it. No hidden meaning or translatable profundity to be unearthed by the careful observer. It was just… motion. The meaningless spasms of rudderless torsos. I felt deeply self-conscious walking amongst them, looming as I did a head above the rest. The air felt thinner up here and my brain began to swim, a growing feeling of dizziness had combined with the itch at the back of my neck that had been plaguing me all morning.
I stopped in the middle of the road like a lost lamb, trying desperately to get my discombobulated brain back under control. A car turned the corner behind me and just as I turned to look it ploughed into me at full force, sending me tumbling through morning air in a shower of teeth and blood. Through a red fog I saw a headless driver waving its arm through the window of the retreating car. It was neither a greeting nor an apology; just motion.
The next few hours of my memory blur into an increasingly surreal slide-show. Swimming images of headless locals moved in and out of focus above me, looming over my battered body making half-hearted gestures of help. Then I was in the center of town surrounded by shops and cars and hazy hordes of almost-people, with not a single voice to break the crisp autumnal air. Next, I was in front of twenty televisions in a shop window, watching what was supposed to be the news. Headless anchors sat mutely side by side whilst words of pure gibberish fanned across the screen.
The next thing I remember was arriving at my workplace and collapsing at reception in a wretched bundle on the floor. No one disturbed me while I slept. When I awoke, I realized it had all been a dream. Of course it had, how could it not be? Standing above me was Fran with her head fully intact, smiling her lover’s smile which had greeted me every morning without fail for years. I reached out towards her in sleepy relief. “thank God it’s you”, I said. Taking my hand in her tender palms, she smiled even wider with the sun ablaze behind her. She opened her mouth and said: “a tidy workplace is a happy workplace”.
The words hung in the air like a tangible object. Indeed, it felt like if I were to reach out further, I would actually be able to touch those stark yellow letters which hovered beside Fran’s smiling freckled face. It took me a few moments to remember that my wife had never had freckles. Indeed, the more I blinked and focused, the more I saw that this ginger apparition was not my wife at all: it was in fact the poster which hung next to the reception desk at my office. I looked glumly at the smiling redheaded worker with pearly white teeth and merciless eyes. Turning my head towards the front desk, I saw a headless receptionist pouring coffee down its front.
I sighed a long, heavy sigh. For quite a while I could not bring myself to get up. Blood was trickling slowly down my temple from a wound somewhere above my left eye. I needed stitches, bandages, painkillers. I needed cotton and hot towels and ambulance sirens, and whatever else necessary to fill this gaping hole in my forehead. Through an enormous effort of the will, I heaved myself up and felt strength returning to my legs. Using the wall for support, I drifted steadily past reception, not bothering to sign in like normal.
The office hummed with activity, the sounds of work and routine reverberating through the space unimpeded by the usual chorus of professional chit-chat. They were in here too, of course, sitting at every desk in eerily neat rows. They beat at keyboards and scribbled notes and scolded themselves with hot drinks.
My own cubicle was completely empty. Bob, my co-worker, approached me and gently slapped me on the arm. This was the greeting that had developed between us over our eleven years of collegial intimacy. Bob flopped back into his chair and, as I peered over his shoulder, resumed to his task of typing utter nonsense into an email addressed to no one. The pitter patter of keyboards surrounded me in that tight office space, appearing to grow louder with every passing moment. Row after row, desk after desk, the headless were pounding at their keyboards with rhythmless fervour.
Without thought they had come here, all of them, to this ordinary place on this most extraordinary day, to do what they had done for years. The whole world had changed in a single momentous night, and not one of them had noticed. I looked from one vacuum to the next, searching desperately for the comfort of a familiar face. It struck me, then, that I could not envisage them at all; could not draw them from the recesses of my memory. Those serious faces made pale blue by the light of their screens, those that had sat beside me every day for over a decade, had dissolved into the nothingness which had now claimed their heads.
As I watched them, the dizzy spell that I experienced that morning began to creep back over me. That dull, pulsing pain at the base of my neck was now joined by a distinct sensation of burning. This yawning heat expanded steadily across my upper chest and stretched between my shoulder blades, as if piece-by-piece something was being disconnected from its foundation. My head began to feel light as a feather and, for a moment, I imagined that I could actually hear the popping and snapping of those snaking red cords submerged in my neck; the ligaments and sinews which until now had connected my skull to its blood-and-bone frame. Pictures swam before me, images so vivid and disturbing that I shuddered with fear in my quietly creaking desk chair. I saw my head being finally untethered and lifted from my body by a great mass of multi-coloured balloons. Out through the window and up into the air it went, above the buildings and the hills, above the whole of the Earth, and all its creatures. Finally, as it ascended slowly into the clouds, it began to hiss – and with a gentle a puff vanished into steam.
I do not know how much time passed until I finally returned to the room, struck dumb with terror and confusion as I was. I was staring listlessly at my computer, its familiar glow oddly comforting in the dingy dark office. What next? I should seek help; I needed bandages and water. I should get more information on the headless, find some way to put an end to this lunacy. I should look for another face, I should hunt down the truth, I should…
I then remembered, rather unexpectedly, the work I had been doing the previous day. It was an important project with a fast-approaching deadline, Mr Bishop had assured me of that. Rifling through the stack of documents on my desk – some for reading, some for filing – I found what I was looking for: the project brief. Ah yes, it was all coming back to me now. A familiar cocktail of duty and pressure welled up within me. Perhaps I should have a quick look at it again? It had seemed so awfully important yesterday.
The day proceeded routinely enough from there, indeed I was so consumed by the happy necessity of work that for many hours I actually forgot the horrors to which I had awoken that day. The itching had gone from the back of my neck also. Blessed relief had come all at once. After work, I set off home feeling more at ease than I had felt in a long time. What’s a spot of headlessness next to the daily demands of a busy workplace, after all? I briefly entertained some vague notion about continuing on my quest of the morning, but the day had been long and all I wanted was to return to my home and see my family.
It was with a warm glow in my belly that I arrived home to see Fran and Alfie waiting for me. Sitting in the living room engaged in loving, silent play, they were the very picture of familial serenity. I hugged them happily and then rushed off to make dinner. I felt so much more myself again, and somehow it felt as if my family were too!
I remember sitting in the living room that evening putting my feet up and feeling free. Free from all the strain and fear that had weighed me down that morning. I held my family close and we watched TV. The daily shows were either blank static or silent headless, though some repeats were running which I enjoyed immensely. The next day I got up, had breakfast, went to work, came home, and watched TV, all with a new-found appreciation for my life as it stood. When it came down to it, what had really changed after all?
***
And, well, here I am still. Life rolls on through thick and thin, and I couldn’t be happier – honestly!
Driving has become perhaps a bit more erratic, and conversations with my colleagues have lost some of their appeal. The absence of Mr Bishop’s barking voice has done me wonders, however, and I have recently found that I enjoy the new style of communication more than the old one! Position yourself, gesture intermittently, and let the mind wander off wherever it wants. Aside from that, I cannot say that life has been altered all that much by the human race’s collective decapitation.
I cannot say how long it has been; I lost count after month three. The days don’t seem to matter so much anymore; one leading into the next in an unending cycle of work and bliss, work and bliss, more work and more bliss. Yes, the only hiccup in my otherwise idyllic life are those moments when, occasionally, I remember that I myself still have a head. After so long amongst the headless, the knowledge of that cumbersome blob sitting atop my body seems so unnatural that I can’t stand to look at it! Like an unwanted hitchhiker it perches between my shoulders, an ungainly dome with pearly white teeth and merciless eyes staring in silent accusation.
Most of the time its easy to ignore this ugly burden that I carry round with me. I have removed all mirrors from the house and avoid clear surfaces whenever possible. I’ve also taken down the poster of that freckled impostor at reception, she being an unwelcome daily reminder of my embarrassing predicament. I’ve replaced her with a landscape. Despite my best efforts, however, I sometimes catch glimpses of my towering deformity and the Earth once again quakes under my feet. One of these days I will have to commit to a more permanent solution. I will overcome my inhibition and make good use of that serrated bread knife in our kitchen.
Until that day, however, I am happy to live and work and watch TV with my family, and forget about my unique aberration that was once considered normal. Now, when an old show comes on featuring those strange, misshapen melons, I just switch off the set and stretch back in my chair. Nothing ever happens of course, but that’s just fine with me. I’m content to smile and pretend the show has gone on, just as Fran and Alfie do as they sit here beside me.