Head, Augmented

She sits by a display case with eight severed chicken heads, representing Presence and Absence. Some of the heads are labeled ‘rose’, some ’pea’, some ‘walnut’. One head is ‘single’. These refer to the combs, the red flesh that each chicken wears on its head, partly, she reads, to keep warm when it is cold.  A similar texture surrounds the eyes, the beak and down the sides of the throat; looking closely, she sees that in fact most of the head is covered by it. As she studies the heads, the sudden feeling of baldness begins to spread over her own head like a warm liquid. The sensation is new to her; she has never before felt the need for a wattle, or a dewlap, or for a particularly long earlobe. She wants to go to the chapel and pray for a comb, she wants to pray to Presence and to Absence, which seem to her to be the biological deciders of which species got combs and which didn’t. She wants a worble, and a face that grows and for that growth to be red and wrinkled. She knows she won’t get it. She will have to make do with a quiet face.

If she were to choose, she thinks, looking over the different heads and their different labels, she would choose the classic single, though the cushion comb, pictured in the infographic on the display case, is becoming. Her colleague, with a little microphone, is giving a tour of the museum. They are back from their lunch – soup, and coconut squares given to him by a student. After eating, he told her that he was homesick and that he cried every night. He said he’s always cold, why is it always so cold here? Now she watches him open the drawers of pinned insects; his face is so pale and his eyes are so small. 

Out on the street, she studies the faces walking by with a new intensity. She’s trying to get to her bike but it’s too busy so she leans against a wall and lets herself slide down to the ground, stays there immobile and grub-like, waiting for the people to go. She can’t help feeling that she is, in her current form, unadapted for that which surrounds her, the cold, the rush of people on the busy street, and that she needs a better head, augmented, encased in rubbery red. 

When she finds her bike, it takes her some time to wrestle with the lock. Someone else is unlocking their bike too and for some reason she gives them an apologetic look. Now her helmet is on, the crowd thins and she can cycle quickly through. It starts to rain. She likes the sound of the water hitting her plastic head. When she arrives home she is sticky with sweat and her head is hot under the helmet. She undoes the strap under her chin – the plastic of which has been digging into her skin – and removes the white shell. Part of her wants never to part with the helmet. There is friction and in the mirror she sees the hairs at the top of her head stick up; she thinks she looks quite good. The helmet is placed on a chair in the hallway, so that she’ll be able to admire it on her way to the toilet and back, every time she goes. Also in the hallway, there is a pile of clothes she must mend. It is always growing, her clothes are always falling apart. She adds to the pile the dress she is wearing. While she was cycling the zipper broke and came undone and she was almost naked on her bike. She puts on her shower cap and gets into the shower. She likes the sound of the water hitting her plastic head. There are sirens out the window and sounds from the school. She wonders where the boyfriend is, then hears the key in the door. Coming into the bathroom to pee, she sees that he looks terrible, he has a bad cold. His eyes and nose are red. It’s the third time this month that he’s been ill. She wraps herself in one of the towels and puts on his slippers. In the kitchen, she gives the fridge a good kick to let the mouse know that she’s there, she’s in no mood for its games. She cleans chicken legs in the sink, though she knows it’s probably not wise to be cleaning raw chicken while wearing a towel, but the thought of putting on clothes disgusts her more than the thought of getting raw chicken juice on a clean towel. 

A week later, she has a cold herself. She steps out to buy some onions but she’s not wearing a scarf and her head is bare. She makes a soup, it’s the only thing she can do. That night she dreams that in a bike accident she loses all of her teeth. The helmet has failed her. Presence and Absence have failed her. But in her haste to curse them, she has not noticed that her face without its teeth has softened and become elastic, the jaw narrows to a point, bringing the nose along with it, and the left and right sides of the jaw bone join together in a kind of beak in front of her face. She wakes up from the boyfriend’s screams. She gets up to pee. It’s only a few hours until she has to go to work. As the sun is coming up, she walks three times around the pond in the park. An old woman gives her pieces of white bread from her palm. Another has seeds. Leaving the park, she nearly gets knocked off her bike by a car that swerves too close to her. Rats scuttle out of the bushes and run across her path. She locks her bike outside the museum. Someone has left their bike light on and she switches it off. Inside the museum, her colleague is guiding a group, talking about the specimens. The wooden floorboards creak under their feet as they move between the glass display cases. He is talking about moles and as he explains about their extra thumbs, his voice gets caught, the microphone is a raspy little insect clipped to his lapel, he knocks it as he reaches for his handkerchief and he wipes his wet eyes. She wants to cry too, she wants to go away. She has a cold head! She thinks maybe it is time she migrates to warmer climates. She abandons her helmet in the museum. 

On her way south, she watches the black cows on the hill growing smaller, the hills growing flat. She skirts the wind turbines, and moves through the clouds splitting with light. She realises looking down that on the ground you are always going inside and out of the shadow of some thing above you which you cannot see, this is what you realise when you are watching the shadow of yourself on the roofs and roads. When she arrives down south, she lies down on the warm sand and waits for sleep. She fills her beak with sweet fruit and her head is in a golden glow.