Rylan won’t change the lightbulb in the living room. She won’t sit down to read, watch a movie or play scrabble there, and it’s all because of the heads. She doesn’t say it, but I can tell she’s growing afraid of them. Except it’s not exactly the whole of heads. It’s the eyes. Rylan won’t say she’s afraid, but she says there’s something uncomfortable in their eyes. Something about how, there, their desire and hunger feels like before. Like when they were still dangerous and attached. She has decided that she prefers cooking instead of cleaning. She’ll come into the living room, tiptoeing as she looks intently down to avoid the blinking eyes from the shelves, and pick up one of the cookbooks that she ordered and I shelved between biographies and Shakespeare.
At first, the results were sad. Rylan’s cooking was so bad that I, too, wished to be a head within a glass jar, jaw glued shut, incapable of chewing her undercooked rice and her overcooked ribs. But, since she refused to spend time in the living room and made the kitchen her new playroom, within a couple months of chewing thoroughly Rylan turned into a great cook. She’ll make these three or four course dinners almost every night, and whenever she doesn’t feel like cooking, she’ll call the Thai place and get us drunken noodles, pad see ew, and two Thai iced teas. I am, in turn, in charge of keeping the living room in shape. I don’t mind it. I like the heads. I like that they’re there, still, silent. I have a system: when they’re being too much, I just turn the glass bell around. This is how I found that some of them were starting to go bald, their thin hairs creating a slow growing carpet under the severed throat. I talk to them as I push the vacuum away from me, knowing that they can barely hear me above the noise and inside their crystal bubbles. I tell them about my day, about the books I’m reading, about the friends who got married, or died, or had a kid. I never talk about Rylan, though. She asked me not to. And they have no choice but to listen. I like that they have no choice but to listen, even when it’s true what Rylan says, their eyes do have a strange way of following you as you move. As if they’re feeling joy in the movement, except their joy comes within the jealousy felt in the missing of their bodies. A phantom jealousy for phantom limbs.
For me, the detachment process began in winter. It was Rylan’s idea. During summer, she had picked up one of those free newspapers, one of those in which the words are either offers or code for missed connections, because she wanted to clean our windows. That’s where she learned about it. We were making good money, he was not fired after the incident but I had been promoted, so we had some extra. She placed a check for the most expensive membership –the one that promised to turn you into a detachment expert in a month– on an envelope and addressed it copying the ad. Within a week, the detachment manual and a code for accessing the videos came in the mail. All of this she had kept a secret from me. It was a gift. She felt ready that winter, when we were walking around the city, holding hands and sipping peppermint mochas as we asked each other questions. This was our game. The challenge was to imagine more and more scenarios that could be condensed into a “what if…”. What if we woke up one morning and everyone else was dead? What if we could speak any language in the world, except for the one the other spoke? What if we could only eat one food for the rest of our lives? What if we could prove that ghosts exist? And then, Rylan stopped walking, which made me stop with her, she turned to face me without letting go of my hand, and, in a deeper voice, she told me the story of the manual, the code, the practice videos she had watched over and over. What if I could make him disappear? She asked me. Or, even better, what if I could keep him in a state where he could never hurt you again? I stared at her, without responding at first, not understanding that what she was trying to tell me was not a game anymore. I opened my mouth again to phrase a jumbled and confused whatyoumean? She repeated the question, giving me a second. What if we could? She was looking at me, a little smile out of the corner of her lips crooking the lines of her face. What if I told you I know how? she said, showing me the corner of her sharp canines.
She achieved her first complete detachment the night of Valentine’s Day, after a couple of failed attempts. I felt elated and free. Rylan came home with that first head, his head, and I felt like a baby who finally learns how to walk and can walk away from their parents, instead of being forever dependent. His head was my gift. I was Rylan’s valentine. The city expanded back into the never-ending labyrinths and adventures it had been before: before the night when his hunger had taken something from me, before the fear had taken the shape of my collarbones and kneecaps. I received the sad, and old, news through a corporate email that claimed he had passed from a heart attack and provided us with a fifteen-minute session with a counselor to process the loss. Having him there, looking at us behind the bell jar that we had bought at Walmart, made me feel giddy, nauseous, like a kid floating after letting go from the highest point in a swing. Rylan and I held hands at strangers’ house parties and in the subway, coming out always at the wrong exits, and riding buses through their whole routes just to see the city under different lights and from different perspectives. We were powerful, knowing that nobody could hurt us again. We were defiant. We wanted to get hurt. We had bought a six-piece set of glass jars and we filled them before the end of winter.
Besides keeping the living room clean, Rylan doesn’t ask too much of me. I get to hold her at night and brew her coffee in the morning. It’s important to her that I don’t ask too many questions and it’s important to me that she keeps up with our agreement. She’ll cook, I’ll clean. She’ll order the books; I’ll organize them in our shelves. She’ll select the men; I will do the background check to make double sure they deserve it. She’ll make them fall in love; I’ll do the grocery shopping. She’ll perform the detachment; I will receive her with a bubble bath. She’ll bring the heads home; I’ll do the glueing to shut their mouths. I always thought you had to sew it, but taxidermy.net suggested glue. I watched Youtube videos to learn the correct technique, Taxidermy for beginners – a lesson in how to stuff animals, How to Taxidermy School videos, Bobcat Taxidermy – Mammal Taxidermy, Taxidermy: How to Do It. The head owners don’t have a big role to play, although sometimes they strive to be more of a protagonist and will try to bite as I’m working. Because of this, we have opted for a deviation in the taught method: Rylan slips a sleeping pill before performing the detachment. It’s for their own good. Working with teeth is complex. One small mishap could cause both of us to bleed all over the work station in our garage. I’m starting to think that I’ll have to change my method, for the sake of Rylan, and glue their eyes shut, too. Until now I have allowed them to keep their eyes open inside their glass jars. I’m not sure why. It might be because I want to show them some kind of mercy, but it might also be because I want them to see us: Rylan and I, our lives, our games of hide and seek and our long dinners. Our happiness without them. The safety that the lack of their limbs provides us.
We don’t fight much, Rylan and I, and when we do, it’s always about the heads. Our latest fight was about a ginger. She was all in for him, thinking that it would maybe change something in the room for her, having a pair of green eyes and a lighter focus. She said she doesn’t want to be afraid, but she is: of their hunger, of the anger that she senses even when she’s not looking. She said, crying, that she wanted to feel something beyond guilt and anger when she steps into the living room. That she would like to go back to our old routine: reading on the couch, playing scrabble on the floor, stretching in front of the heads. She said that, maybe, if she could look up and see green, she could be happy. He felt safe and soft, she promised. He wasn’t dangerous, or at least not any more dangerous than we were. He was more in love with her than in lust, and sweet and kind. And green is her favorite color, she reminded me. But I felt it would interfere with the curation of our collection. Gingers are too bright and loud and ours is, above all, a practice with a purpose. It’s decoration but it’s also revenge, no matter how much she repeats that she hates the sound of that word. And I even tried, for her, to cure her of her fear and to battle the regret that was forming a tiny wrinkle between her eyebrows, but his record came back clean. Not even a petty post on social media. Nothing. He didn’t deserve it. It would’ve clashed with our colors and our ideals. We want to make sure we’re choosing those that go with our vibe: sharp, harsh, guilty. We’re providing a service by containing them here. I had to remind her, holding her as she kept on crying, our desire to collect them is also a desire for safety. I paid for the Thai food that night. My treat, I said as I held her while she typed a goodbye text for the ginger.
Somedays I catch myself empathizing with the fact that they don’t really know what happened to them. I also get a strange sense of satisfaction from it. When I’m cleaning their glass jars, every so often I get a confused stare from within. They look at me like someone who believes they are still dreaming. Not often, but sometimes I wonder what it must be like to open your eyes and find a hand spraying something and then running a cloth on the glass around your head. I wonder if, for example, they can make out the names on the spines of the books that face toward them. I wonder if they still know how to read, if they count in their minds, if they try to open their mouths and scream, if they throw phantom limbs around, fighting and fighting and fighting against the glass prison, to no avail. It makes me wonder what they think, because I know they still do. They have to. Rylan has assured me that the detachment process, which I still don’t fully understand, is as humane as possible. Do they imagine they’re dead? Do they see themselves as astronauts, or mice, or prisoners? Do they remember the things they did before? Do they dwell on their memories? Do they try to move their fingers? And if they do, do they find an echo or an emptiness?
What I find most interesting of the detachment process is that it’s bloodless. As with her cooking, Rylan has turned into an absolute expert: she’s now considered one of the top detachers in the country. She was asked, by the same company that first sold her the manual, to give a conference. She’s undecided about it. She’s the youngest most prolific detacher, and she has even made it to a “best of” list this year, but I see the light trembling of her hands when she returns from her detachment sessions. Not a thrill anymore, but a sign of exhaustion. The thing is, when Rylan sets her mind to do something she’ll find a way achieve it, which is what I love the most about her, but it’s also what’s keeping her from changing the lightbulb that only she can reach. As I said, I don’t mind cleaning the living room. I don’t mind vacuuming with thirty pairs of eyes on me, but I also want her to be happy. Happy as I was that winter afternoon when she shared her plan with me. Loved and special as I felt loved and special, which is why I can’t be upset or frustrated when I see her rushing through the living room, her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes averted. She has seen too much, Rylan, even when she hasn’t seen their blood or the purple of their tongues when they try to bite. She has seen those eyes while still attached to the hands, the legs, the sex. She has listened to their voices while they whisper, softly, in her ears. She has seen the eyes open and close in disbelief, while she engages with the detachment process. She has protected me from their bodies, their profanities, their skin extended for the length their bodies. Rylan, who I had admired since the day we met, chose me to be her partner in detachment. The least I can do is keep the living room clean and order the groceries that she requests after meal planning.
We decided together that we wouldn’t keep a record of their past lives. As soon as she’s home, Rylan rushes to her bubble bath, dropping head and wallet in the garage. Once the head is ready and mounted, we burn their paperwork in front of their eyes. We, now, do this slowly, in fractions and chapters. With the first head, with his head, we made the mistake of burning the contents of his wallet immediately. It was a pleasurable experience, seeing his eyes expanding as the picture of the children he had fathered and wouldn’t see again was turning to black and red between Rylan’s fingers. But we ran out of materials too fast, and then we could only retort to language, which didn’t help Rylan’s feelings towards the heads. One can only say so many things to an immovable subject before feeling the weight of the words and the weight of the feelings provoked. We want them to know that we see them as exactly what they are: hunted, punished, decoration. But we also want them to feel a twinge of what they can and have caused, a slow burn that burns for ages. So now, Rylan stays in the kitchen and I do it. I burn their photographs and receipts and driver’s licenses while saying their name for the last time. I play the game with them. What if you could never again hurt anyone else? What if you were as beautiful and useless as a plant? What if everyone you’ve ever met forgot about you? What if someone finds the rest of you, but never your head, never ever your beautiful and enraged little head?
Majo Delgadillo (Guadalajara, Jal. 1991) is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California, San Diego and the PhD program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, where she also was Student Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the IUCRC BRAIN Center. She writes about bodies, memory, pop culture, the fantastic, history, and horror, and is interested in how these interact and intersect. Her work has been published in Carte Blanche Magazine, Camas Magazine, the Revista de la Universidad and Erizo Journal for the Arts, among others. She has published the digital piece machine3.xyz and the book of short stories Lullabies for the End of the World (Bakstenen Huis, 2021) and its Spanish translation Canciones de Cuna para el Fin del Mundo (Editorial Paraíso Perdido 2022). She was a finalist for the Casa Wabi Narrative Prize – Dharma Books 2023. She currently teaches at James Madison University in Virginia, USA.