My Head Is Suddenly Just A Skull - Timothy C Goodwin

One night, Tommy got sloshed enough on my whiskey to look me right in the eye sockets and suggest something he saw on an old episode of MacGyver: if you need to recreate a face on a skull—and here Tommy paused, tipped his chin down and raised a hand up to flourish an indication towards my head—what you do is you take a bunch of pencils, the ones with erasers, and you cut the erasers off them and then you glue the erasers all over the skull because it turns out, MacGyver said, Tommy went, pencil erasers are the depth of all the skin and muscle and stuff and whatever that makes up your face so then you take clay and you slather it all over the skull using the erasers as a depth marker and then we just zhwoop blend it into your neck and voila, Tommy says, sloshing booze all over my carpet, you'll have your old face back, except, he says, you know, he goes, we could finally get you a face without all the—and here he waggled his hand, fingers splayed, in front of my head again—you know.

Yeah, I knew.

I knew what that waggle meant. All the stuff anyone had ever said about my face—my old face—before it turned into a skull: a nose that looked like it was trying to drive off in the opposite direction as the rest of me (Marjory Jawaski, second grade). Eyebrows that looked like two dead, desiccated foxes (Mrs. Bootsly, church function). A jaw that earned me the underdeveloped nickname Jaw (the lacrosse team, whispering-to-be-heard from the next aisle in the locker room). Even my parents kept all my school pictures below eye-level.

But now? With my head a skull? I didn’t have to worry about any of that. I could just be doing normal stuff, like Me, instead of all those daily routines/regimens to keep things as best I could. And shouldn’t everyone be as happy as I was? Now that they didn’t have to look at that face?

You ever have an entire 4-Towns Arts Festival—food tents, face-painting tent, mailboxes-recycled-as-lamps tent (Tommy’s), band tent—all stop what they're doing and look at you, the awkward silence curdlingly broken by little Samantha Penhaligon—her own face painted like a skeleton, go figure—screaming at the sight of you?

Suddenly everyone seemed real keen on getting me my old face back.

I like my skull, though. I like my skull.

Oh no, dude, Tommy drunk-blinked, cutting erasers off a fresh pack of no.2s on my coffee table with my switchblade, no way dude you can't like your skull, dude. You need a face. Dude. Don't you—oh. Shit. Whoa dropped this pencil—Hey don't you worry—and here he squinted and smiled while he poked the air in my direction with the switchblade—we're gonna MacGyver you a face everyone will like.

I imagined me at a tent at the Arts Fair, everyone taking turns fixing my new clay face.

Clawing at it. Mushing it. Scraping this, smashing that.

I reached up to my neck. Felt around for the area where the skin of my body met with my skull head. And I peeled. And I peeled. And I peeled.

***

Timothy C Goodwin has stuff in HAD, Dishsoap Quarterly, BULL, JAKE, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.