written for my friend kenny, a long while ago. I closed my eyes and pointed my finger to a track on a neutral milk hotel album and started writing. this is what came out:
As the setting sun blazes and rips through the western sky, a young Kenny Laubbacher dangled from a tree and watched it dip like an egg yolk from it’s shell back into the earth. He prefers this view upside down because he never liked how the world has been looking right side up anyway. Kenny was a strange boy. He seemed to insist he’s not of this world, a peculiar creature has found himself trapped in a thin, soft layer of skin, wrapped around protruding bones, clumsy capped knees, aged seven years. He owned fleshy feet that stumbled over themselves, fitted in funny-looking houses encased in lace and rubber.
His parents were devastated, as he protested his own childlike existence, he vowed not to leave his makeshift tree house in the woods that line his foreign home until he can find a map back to his place of origin. His eyes are sour and dry, a symptom of over-blinking, hoping he could close his eyes and wake from this awful nightmare. Doctors have established that such a condition; a confusion of identity is a deep psychological disorder. (One often rooted in over-consumption of Mexican novelties) Kenny believes otherwise. Should you sit down and discuss this bizarre phenomenon with him, he will speak with great conviction of a glorious valley that lines the backwoods, one native to an abundance of other spectacularly odd children, some with gills, others with glass eyes, but nearly all have two heads. Kenny was a two-headed boy. He seemed to have lost his other mind.
The fascinating dilemma this presents is that such ‘two-headed boys’ experience physical symptoms from their phantom head’s absence. Kenny says his only head operates under logic, but the mind which he has lost stores his ability to love. Without it, his heart remains sick. Sometimes his chest writhes in pain, because his heart aches. So he spends most days skipping in delirium, if witnessed, it appears as madness. He is lost. Largely, he plays alone, and often seen speaking to his shoulder, where his former head would rest.
Children would gather around young Kenny, his frightened disposition was curious to his peers, these other creatures that occupy similar looking fleshy suits, covered by denim overalls, moccasins, and scarves would circle him and listen to him speak clever words strung and bound in sweet sentences. His voice served as soothing medicine to these children eager for something greater than the pixels that shoot from their television screens. These are children, and as he explains his story to them, their fantastic pupils enlarge and the holes in their faces widen. They too have seen such a valley, and reject the idea that he was only dreaming, because in dreams, one cannot hear wind rattle through their ears so hard they wake with sore eardrums.
Out of this group of children with filthy hands and mouths, a blistering girl named Pree sat idly on a tree stump, listening to Kenny speak of his missing head and thought surely he’d look silly with another head, his current one hardly served him well. However, she believed that home was not here in this place for him, and that if she could help him find it, maybe he could find that blessed place he and find rest. He’d possessed the saddest eyes she’d ever seen.
She trudged through dirt, scanning horizons, walking endlessly in search for a head to present to dear Kenny. Her feet would swell and dissolve into roots and thorns, and daylight began leaking from the skies, she knew she had to return home quickly. She was alone and frightened as sounds of howling wolves echoed from ear to ear. She retraced her steps and discovered that she was lost, so lost that the trees smelled differently, their branches were broody and unfamiliar. She caught a glimpse of a shadow swimming in the corner of her eye. She turned around and saw Kenny dangling from a branch, plucking away at a mandolin, whistling a somber tune, completely alone. She ran towards him and shouted his name. Stunned, he fell on his head and began to cry. A giant bump began to form on the left side of his head as he smoothed over it with his fingers. He rubbed it again and again, assured it was growing. He was elated, in one hopeful breath he said, “my head! It has returned!”
Pree let out a reckless laugh, “funny boy, it’s only a bump”
At once, Kenny looked over at Pree and watched her giggle, and sit down beside him. She laid her head on his shoulder and all of the tiny golden hairs on his arms stood up.
The weight that rested on his shoulder felt lighter than he’d remembered. His chest began to burst and lighten. He no longer felt an alien, in fact, he began to feel he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
That night, young Kenny Laubbacher fell in love with a young blistering Pree.
Perhaps another world existed for both children that night, but neither cared- they just waited to watch golden yolk to fall from the sky once again.
