Susannah Breslin The Woman Who Lost Her Head One morning, she woke up and discovered that her head was gone. She had reached up to pat her hair, or rub the sleep from her eyes, or scratch her ear, and she had realized that her head was nowhere to be found. Where, she wondered, had it gone? She had no idea at all. She could not recall, in fact, very well what had happened the previous evening. She had been at a bar, and she had gotten drunk, and then she had come back home. From what she could remember, her head had still been sitting squarely on her shoulders when she had climbed into bed. Perhaps, she considered, her head had run off at some point during the night while she lay sleeping. Maybe, it had grown tired of her endless procrastination in her writing career, or the cruel way in which she beat herself up inside her own mind, or the relentless bad taste that she always seemed to have in men. It was entirely possible that her head, therefore, had detached itself from her body, and rolled itself off her bed, and across her floor, and out her front door like the meatball from the song that she had sung as a child. It was, indeed, entirely conceivable that, as she had overslept, her head had already gone out, and gotten a facial, and a makeover, and a blow-out, and was, at this very moment, sitting on a booster seat, sipping a low-fat latte at some chic outdoor cafè, drawing hot men like flies to shit, mentally writing the first chapter of its first novel, hardly thinking, even in the back of itself, about her at all. Sitting on the edge of her bed in her apartment, she tried to put her head down into her hands to cry, but, of course, she could not do this. Why couldn't her head have stayed with her body until death when, in some crematorium's blaze, amidst the ashes and the dust, they would have been finally parted? Now, with no head, she had no idea what she would spend the rest of her life doing. She would have to stay here, in this place, twiddling her thumbs, and doing sit-ups, and masturbating herself. Afraid to venture outside for fear she would never again be truly seen, she would wait for her head to come back home to her. Her feet would pace the floor. Her hands would curl up into fists. Her heart would skip beats with its longing. Quack