Head Like a Hole

by Andrew Van Wey

in buzzing whispers that slid through his thoughts, like roots probing the rocks and soil of his mind.

The name tasted sweet on his tongue, like blackberries from his grandmother’s garden.

That was his grandmother here, behind him. The Estée Lauder perfume she lathered herself in every Sunday filled his raw nostrils.

He can almost smell the incense and coffee. That’s the power of memory, he supposes. Every one is unique, carved into neurons and strengthened through emotions and senses. It’s why so many adults never move past the music of their youth.

She was in him, inside, all intermixed with

his thoughts and scratched over his past.

Mostly, when he thought of tomorrow, all he saw was Oksana.

Louis felt that buzzing, like caterpillars crawling across the backs of his eyes.

Then the caterpillars squirmed behind his eyes.

AREN’T YOU ASHAMED YOU’RE NOT A MAN BUT A WORM

He could feel the caterpillars back behind his eyes, furious and scratching, and his grandmother’s voice preparing to scream.

It didn’t make much sense, but love never did.

He suspected she was enjoying her new jaw. God, she’d made a mess when she’d consumed it.

Her head rose out of the bag on a column of tendons and bone. He thought of a centipede stretching for a leaf.

He tasted the past.

He thought of windchimes as she spoke.

That name was a stone on her tongue, and her mouth was trying to find balance between spitting it out or choking it down.

In Graham’s experience, the myth of the somber medical examiner was just that, a myth. Some of his best conversations had been with men and women who worked with the dead. They were a chatty bunch who knew the silence of death and appreciated the noises of life.

All the while, that cry echoed out, wet agony and madness.

Her voice reminded him of gravel and cotton candy.

that bandage wasn’t there to keep the dirty stuff out of her injury. Maybe it was to keep the dirty stuff in.

Was this what it felt like to slowly go crazy? To believe in something deeply, devoutly, and yet have little evidence to show?

The human mind had a way of pushing back at the unsettling, quarantining it, relegating it to dark corners.

“I was mad at you. For the longest time, I was furious. Do you know what fury tastes like? How it sits on your tongue? How it poisons your thoughts until it’s the only warmth that you know?”

“Do you know what it’s like to have nothing? To be reduced to the barest scrap of existence? To eat desperation? Of course not. You and your friends, you whine about hardships, but you’ve never tasted misery. You’re a tourist to suffering.”

Beneath the fury, she was wounded and angry. At surviving. At being trapped. At being alone and abandoned.

And there Megan stood between the blistering heat on her cheeks and the cool fog on her back, the past still reaching out and screaming to be heard.