The Headless Man was moving along slowly down the sidewalk, with his white cane for blind people. It is that, indeed, he had no eyes to orient himself as he walked the crowded urban environment.
As I was always a charitable soul towards the handicapped, I approached him to give a hand. I took him gently but firmly by the arm, unequivocally indicating my intention to guide him through the human jungle. I did not say anything to him, because I figured that without ears my efforts to offer him spoken words would be in vain.
In response to my initiative, I heard a pleased growl from his guts, which mixed up with the deafening noise of a motorcycle passing us on the street.
We walked a few yards down the sidewalk and I do not hesitate to assert that an intimate climate of communication created between the Headless Man and me.
Now that I remember that winter afternoon, I blush and my skin bristles with excitement. It is that I was an innocent, jubilant and idealistic girl, always looking for the unseen benefit in the harshness of the world and eternally trying to improve it even more.
I must admit that the Headless Man was handsome despite I had no access to his facial features due to his headless condition. Nevertheless, he had a good bearing and an elegant gait, dressed in a sober dark suit, worthy of an Englishman.
Walking next to that more than blind man, joined by my grip on his arm, I imagined that he was the British Sting in his character from the song Englishman in New York, walking with his cane among the people on the streets of New York, while the sax of Branford Marsalis enchanted us.
After four or five blocks, when we reached a park, my Headless Man detected a bench with his cane and sat down, resolutely. He was probably tired. I did not know how long he had been wandering around the city when I found him.
I stood next to him, close enough to let him feel the warmth of my presence. He accepted me gently.
Trying not to reveal my maneuvers, I reached out to look over his mutilated body. I found no severed vessels, spinal cord oozing neural tissue through a tube or chipped pieces of vertebral bone. Just a clean, skin-covered cervical stump with no surgical scars. His beheading was evidently congenital.
When I was finishing inspecting his stump, he roughly grabbed my hand. Surely, my soft breath blowing over his exposed skin had given me away. He growled a reprimanding speech at me in his guts.
Therefore, I sat next to him and hugged him tenderly; comforting him and making him understand my solidarity and even my affection for my ventriloquist partner.
We talked for endless minutes, I told him through the caresses of my fingers on the back of his hands about my life as a lonely teenager and he narrated to me from the depths of his gut his daily miseries and his unimaginable loneliness.
I was able to realize that there is thought, sensitivity and the capacity to have empathy and even to love without the presence of that highly overrated organ that is inside the skull that we call the brain. Definitely, my headless man was able to show me his innermost feelings independently of it.
Minutes passed and turned into hours. I soon forgot that I was with an incomplete man. We were like lifelong friends, as if we had known each other forever.
I took him home, without hesitation or apprehension. We snuggled happily on the rug in front of the fireplace. His guts laughed with joy and his body trembled with happiness. In the background, the delicious melodies of Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Branford Marsalis himself sounded. I was in heaven.
Needless to say, that night we made love in every possible way we could find. Our hearts, our hands, and our sexes complemented each other wonderfully. We rewrote the Kama Sutra, adapting it to his lack of head, but it was quite an experience, which we repeated countless times thereafter.
I unashamedly reveal all this, sitting in front of my computer keyboard, immensely happy to have found the man of my life, in my new condition of Headless Woman. We have sworn eternal love to each other through our respective guts.
Marcelo Medone (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a fiction writer, poet and screenwriter. His works have received awards and have been published in magazines and books in more than 30 countries all over the world, including 101 Short Stories, The Dribble Drabble Review, Potato Soup Journal, The Chamber Magazine, Rio Grande Review, (mac)ro(mic), The Cafe Irreal and Otherwise Engaged Journal in the US.
