Mary Lou looked into the medicine cabinet for her husband Carl’s shaving cream so that she could shave her legs. She’d given herself a pedicure, buffed her feet with the pumice stone, and painted her toenails, so she decided that as long as she was doing all that work she might as well do her legs and give herself that all-over feminine feeling.
         Inside the medicine cabinet she found Carl’s head, his eyes open, a certain disappointed glaze to them.
         Mary Lou remembered telling Carl that she didn’t like the deeper style of medicine cabinets, that the design philosophy of any such cabinet should be all things up front—accessible now. No one kept aspirin in a closet, she said, nor did you keep your deodorant, tweezers, unguents, and toothpaste in the garage. Carl, of course, was now meeting that standard of accessibility, though everything else was scattered about as on a sale table at a discount store.
         Mary Lou supposed that the rest of Carl’s body was someplace that would prove equally distressing. Closets seemed suddenly ominous, corners in the bedroom not places a prudent person would go. With 7,200 square feet of living space there could be a lot of spooky places, and it didn’t seem right that you suddenly had to be afraid of your very own house.
         She was wearing only a towel, however, and would have to open their bedroom closet soon, at least before calling the police, since the towel wasn’t even one of their new towels with the improved and deeply luxurious pile. It was an old towel, raggedy and shrunken, its use generally reserved for certain intimate moments. She hadn’t shaved her legs yet, either, so she supposed if she took a minute or two to shave them she could still wear only the towel. She’d have to explain that, but she didn’t think a grown police officer would have trouble understanding her reluctance to open a closet door, not even the broom closet, which was thin and probably couldn’t hold much of Carl. If necessary, she could also tell the police how she would have offered them coffee, but the kitchen cupboards were spacious and deep (and teak) and presented their own ghoulish prospects, not to mention the coffee and sugar canisters.

Mary Lou finally called the police, although right after doing that she hurried back to the bathroom to check the medicine cabinet. In the movies, of course, poor Carl’s head would be gone and Mary Lou would have a double pickle on her hands. The first pickle would involve how to explain things to the police, who would think they were dealing with an old-fashioned hysteric, an intemperate puff. Mary Lou, herself, had friends who could be drunk by noon if the occasion called for it—and sometimes the occasions called in barely a whisper—so she knew the world was not unfamiliar with a wobbly mind.
         The second pickle, naturally enough, would involve the actual location of Carl, in whole or in part. She was glad, she supposed, that this wasn’t a movie. In real life, what had been did not change.
         Carl was still in the cabinet, one eyelid starting to droop. Mary Lou began to wonder if she’d suddenly moved to a place where this kind of thing was common, some struggling Third World nation or one of those culturally-yawed states with too much greenery where political losses were recouped with hatchets and machetes. Heads and feet and arms were always being lopped off in those places. You had to believe the people must not mind it very much, or that they accepted it the way you might accept a tumor or gout in your toe. Carl, though, who had a funny tilt to his mouth as though he might have minded it very much, Carl was about as political as chewing gum.
         This Carl-incomplete was giving Mary Lou her own droopy features. One of the great drawbacks of marriage, she knew, was that it not only gave you a lover and a sport and a champion for a number of years, it could also give you the one person on earth whose hatred of you was so fierce it could melt the girders of new bridges. Mary Lou and Carl hadn’t been hating each other yet, she thought, but faults were being catalogued, lists compiled, the overall theme being, Why aren’t you different? Why aren’t you better?

Officer Jim Ribbon was alone, which led Mary Lou to think immediately she shouldn’t have told 911 that Carl’s head was resting between the Philips Milk of Magnesia and her Infusium-23. Actually, those containers had been tumbled around to where it looked like the bottle of Carl’s own Lipitor was under his ear and keeping his head upright. Anyway, she’d named brand names trying to impress the woman at 911 that she knew what she was seeing and that she was serious. A tragedy had clearly happened, yet only one officer had been dispatched to the scene, no doubt a specialist in wobbly minds. Mary Lou thought she should have screamed and shouted and babbled hysterically.

Officer Ribbon was reluctant to go into the bathroom with Mary Lou, especially since it was a part of the bedroom. His experience had been that women with jiggy stories about their headless husbands often wanted to show you their breasts or birthmarks shaped like various kinds of fast food. Sometimes, they liked to sit casually on the toilet while you sat on the edge of the bathtub. They liked, then, to share words about happiness and pain and all the many struggles of surviving in these uncertain times.
         “Are you alone in the house, ma’am?” Officer Ribbon asked Mary Lou.
         “I don’t think so,” she said.
         Instinctively, Officer Ribbon’s hand moved in the direction of his sidearm.
         “What do you mean?” he asked.
         “My husband. I’m sure he’s here. He’s just not—together.”
         “His head’s missing. You said that on the phone?”
         “No, not at all. Don’t those people make notes on little stickies or something? I know where his head is. He’s a smart man, but he’s always been more than just his head. It’s the rest of him I can’t find.”
         Mary Lou was sitting on the couch in the living room when Officer Ribbon finally decided he’d better look in the bathroom. The woman was wearing only a raggedy towel, the towel held tightly around her, so she wasn’t exactly flashing him. Mostly, she was just there, her legs a bit scratched, certain toiletries giving evidence of hasty application. She was calm, too, damnably calm, too calm to match what she thought she was seeing—but that meant little, as he saw it. Real victims were never shown the script, nor were they ever visited by anyone from make-up or the costume department.
         Officer Ribbon, twenty-six, liked his example. He thought the best way to pierce to the heart of the matter sometimes was to pierce to the heart of another matter. He also noticed that when the woman yawned and stretched—good, even textbook, nervous reactions—she scrunched up her toes. Officer Ribbon liked to think that his powers of observation were particularly keen.
         He asked her where the bathroom was and, as she started to get up, he said, no, he’d prefer to take a look by himself. This was the point, he knew, where a careless officer could get sideswiped into early retirement by really bad people.
         “I haven’t cleaned it lately,” Mary Lou said. “I was going to clean it today.”
         “That’s all right, ma’am,” Officer Ribbon said.

Housecleaning day, indeed, he thought. A big house with all the tidiness of a contracted cleaning service. Could be the husband is simply lost; ought to carry one of those beeper key rings.
         Very well. Shower, Jacuzzi, cobblestone floor, wide-screen television, sliding glass shower doors, deck, back-to-back commodes (all right, they loved each other), double basin sinks with those tall, inverted-J faucets, medicine cabinet/vanity—moderately successful athletic teams could be launched from a facility like this. In the corner were two sets of weights and a padded bench. One set of weights was pink, the other blue. Yes.
         Medicine cabinet. Okay, Officer Ribbon thought. It’s homicide or a blow job. Son of a bitch.
         He stared at the head sitting there. Page after page of instructional text flashed through his mind. He could see answers fairly clearly, but he didn’t know yet what questions to ask. A fly was perched on the nose of the head and he raised his hand to scare it away. Flies, he supposed, were not common occurrences in a house such as this.
         Gently, he closed the door of the cabinet and rejoined the woman in her living room. She’d used his absence to get dressed, a short jumper and flat shoes. Things were jiggly under the jumper so he assumed she was out of underwear. Her poise, though, was unwavering. He decided she was exactly how he’d want to be in any kind of crisis.
         Office Ribbon wasn’t married yet, and Mary Lou was close enough to his own age that he looked hard at her. He wanted to see the marks of marriage, the rubbings, lines, dents, scrapes. Marriage—he wanted that, marriage the merger of two identities into a hybrid so strong that, if it were a seed, the government would not allow it to be planted. This woman had things to do, but she also benefited from a certain division of labor. He could see she’d grown used to assistance and consultation. Corporate credit was always shared, and corporate blame was always easy to take.
         “Do you have any children, ma’am?” Officer Ribbon asked.
         “They were in Carl’s plan,” Mary Lou said. “We hadn’t reached that point in our marriage yet.”
         She was sitting on the couch with her legs straight out, her shoes dangling from her toes. Officer Ribbon thought that was something only a short person could do. It was a flattering pose: wanton, cute.
         “I checked the bedrooms,” he said. He already knew that in a long career bedrooms were going to be a problem—a very personal thing—something of a peeve, maybe a phobia. In a bedroom, vulnerability was everything and blame was hard to find. The intimacy, its very smell, could be choking—fear and sweat, lost honor, love so rich it balled up into dust muffins on the floor. So strange were the exchanges in a bedroom—nasty power, giggly endearments—even without, as he well knew, marriage, that he sometimes thought such rooms should be given greater prominence in the design, ornate entryways, perhaps, neon trim. Bodies that close, shared in extremis and often with matching heartbeats (so he’d heard) redefined civilization from one moment to the next.
         “There was a note on the bed in one of them,” he said.
         “A note?”
         “Right here. It’s not flattering, ma’am. There’s no reason for you to read it unless you want to.”
         He thought his choice of the word ‘want’ was quite poor. No one would ever want to read such a thing, but there were needs. This woman here, he could imagine her having a special place where she kept such things.
         “I don’t understand,” Mary Lou said, wiggling her fingers at him in a way that said the letter, please, right now, right here in my hand.
         “An explanation, an apology, a caution—fairly typical in these situations. We’re driven by a lot of stuff, you know. Getting in the last word is right up there. Sometimes the word is a yell, sometimes a whisper. Sometimes they don’t say anything at all. I’ve never understood that.”

For an instant, things were very clear to Mary Lou, clear in that, while she supposed it was possible to decapitate yourself (really, once people got past pain they could do almost anything), it was not possible to do it and then calmly place your head in the medicine cabinet between the Philips Milk of Magnesia and the Infusium-23. She was wondering what this young officer was concluding about Carl. About her?
         Maybe Carl had help. People talked a lot these days about assisted living and assisted dying, certainly a major transition in a country that had always taken a near-metaphysical pride in its independence. Anyway, Carl had told her one time, during a terrible argument, that he’d rented women in the past, and one time even a boy, that he’d done it because people were so damned interesting and the normal run of life kept you within such a narrow circle. Constricted, he’d said, that’s what he was. The point, of course, during the argument, was that those rentals had been better than Mary Lou—more adept, vicarious, free-spirited. Mary Lou, though, had taken it all in stride, telling herself that it wouldn’t have been much of an argument had Carl been trying to say that she was better in all things than anyone else in the world.
         Still, if you could rent someone who would hold your hand or hold your dick, you could, undoubtedly, rent someone who would hold your head, even put it away when you were through with it.
         “In the note,” she said to Officer Ribbon, “he calls me a bitch, then he says he’ll miss me. Carl was usually more consistent than that, but I imagine powerful emotions were stirring in his heart at the time, juggling his adrenals.”
         “Is there anyone I can call, ma’am? Someone you’d like to have around?”
         “Did you find the rest of Carl?”
         “No.”
         “Then we’ll wait. I can’t ask for help to mourn a head. Can you imagine it? Do I ask for a discount on funeral expenses? Carl told me one time that if he died before I did he wanted to be cremated. But I can’t imagine burning up his head. What a cruel thing to do.”
         Mary Lou smiled then, a big, broad, grinning smile she could see was causing confusion in the young cop sitting next to her and staring at her legs. She felt sorry for the policeman. She could tell he was working from his training and very little experience, always a vulnerable position. The world, though, as he got older he would see that the world had to do these things once in a while. Ligaments, tendons, whims, convictions—all the stretchables needed testing or else decay would result. You wished tragedy on no one, she knew, yet you were enriched by it: sounds were clearer, and the air smelled of ozone. Nothing freshened things up like a wrenching heartbreak.
         “Sometimes your husband’s head ends up on a shelf,” Mary Lou said to the young officer. “It’s an uneven, an illogical world and sometimes it happens. That’s all there is to it.”

G. K. WUORI's stories and poems have appeared in such journals as Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Other Voices, The Missouri Review, New York Stories, Flaunt, Carve, and The Barcelona Review. A Pushcart Prize winner, he has also published a story collection, Nude In Tub, and a novel, An American Outrage, both by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. He lives in Sycamore, Illinois, in a house with eight gables.