One Day, Lucy Cannot Find Her Head
by Francine Witte
Normally, she would try to think where she left it. But now she cannot.
This isn’t completely unexpected.
Men don’t like smart women, her mother had warned.
Men only want your body, her father had warned.
Women don’t look good in hats, her sister had warned.
Meanwhile the head part of Lucy is right there in the kitchen. Lucy had been in the middle of a cookie recipe. The head was filled with ingredient words like whisk and nutmeg, and Lucy was getting overwhelmed. The kitchen was hot and Lucy left the babbling head on the counter while she walked in the other room to cool off.
After a while, the head was sweat on its forehead, hoarse from calling and calling to earless Lucy. Lucy, who was now bumping into everything as she wandered the apartment like a stupid Roomba.
Finally, the head gives up, deciding, like only a head can do, that it is the main part of Lucy, after all. That’s where all the memories are, the appointments, and the knowledge of long division. The head takes a deep sigh breath. Happy now, it closes its eyes.
Meanwhile, the rest of Lucy, the arms and legs and heart of her land inevitably in the kitchen. If this part of Lucy could think, it would reason that it is the most important part what with all the getting to places and digestion and such.
But since it can’t, since it’s no more now than headless Lucy, it lies its bruised and tired self down on the kitchen linoleum, wrapping her arms around herself, her chest rising into the humid air.
Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, Passages North, New Micro, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fiction. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and (The Theory of Flesh.) She is flash fiction editor of FLASH BOULEVARD and South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in NYC.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “One Day, Lucy Cannot Find Her Head”? How many times can you walk into a room and forget what you came in for? Well, I actually don’t even remember that number. Ha. But I thought of that old adage my mother used to throw at me all the time, y’know when I forgot to pick up bread like she asked me – she’s say, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached. I thought of this one day — who remembers why – but it occurred to me that the literal action of this expression might make an interesting story. What if someone actually did forget their head. What would be the sightsmelltouchtastefeel of such a moment? I happened to be in a workshop led by Meg Pokrass and Kathryn Kulpa, two writers I hugely admire. I can’t remember the exact prompt but it must have fit with this thought and voila – the story was born. Now what was the question, again?
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